I am migrating a moodle install from an older system into a new hosted environment with Plesk in the background.
The setup of the Plesk account is straight forward. While the transfer was simple enough using SFTP via FileZilla out of one Linux system to my workstation and off to the new server.
The first obvious task was to modify the config.php file for moodle with its new information.
The less obvious task was the error accessing the moodledata directory which for preference sits outside the Plesk default httpdocs directory.
If you are getting an error about the $CFG->dataroot being invalid or similar it will be the open_basedir setting.
Check the logs for Apache errors
[bash]
#/var/www/vhosts/your_domain_name/statistics/logs/error_log
[/bash]
to modify the default Apache settings in a Plesk world create a file called vhost.conf in the conf directory I use mcedit as my favourite Linux command line editor (apt-get install mc) (Midnight Commander tools)
[bash]
#mcedit /var/www/vhosts/your_domain_name/conf/vhost.conf
[/bash]
and create an entry like
[xml]
<Directory /var/www/vhosts/your_domain_name/httpdocs/>
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/your_domain_name/httpdocs:/var/www/vhosts/your_domain_name/moodledata"
</Directory>
[/xml]
I referenced Aaron Gadberry’s blog for the above but stumbled when it came to restarting the Apache service
[bash]
#/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a
[/bash]
is no longer valid. Given that Aaron wrote his info in 2006 and 5 years later Plesk is version 10 for my server it is not surprising there is a change. The correct command for restarting / reconfiguring a single vhost is
[bash]
#/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpdmng –reconfigure-domain your_domain_name
[/bash]
The final part of this conversion was to modify the Moodle MySQL database to a UTF8 format.
I have used phpmyadmin for years and most Linux servers including Plesk offer it for mySQL admin.
It’s a simple thing to change the database. Just select the database in phpmyadmin and select the Operations tab. Down the bottom is the current collation in a select list. Change the selection to utf8_unicode_ci which is at the very bottom of the list and click on Go.