Chamilo 1.8.7 : Installation Guide

Documentation > Installation Guide

Thank you for downloading Chamilo 1.8.7.

This guide explains how to install Chamilo FREE. Please read this fully before proceeding with the installation.

Contents

  1. Pre-requisites
  2. Installation of Chamilo LMS
  3. Upgrade from a previous version of Chamilo/Dokeos
  4. Troubleshooting
  5. Administration section
  6. LDAP 
  7. Mathematical formulas with LaTeX

1. Pre-requisites

Chamilo can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX servers indifferently. However, we recommend the use of Linux server for optimal flexibility, remote control and scalability.

Chamilo is mainly a LMS running Apache 1.3, 2.0, MySQL 5.1 and PHP 5.2 (the so called AMP trilogy).

All these software are open source and freely available.

To run Chamilo LMS on your server, you need to install WAMP, LAMP or MAMP:

MySQL database server

You will need a login and password allowing to administrate and create at least one database. By default, Chamilo will create a new database for each course created. It means your host should allow you to create and administrate several databases. You can also install Chamilo using only one database, in that case you have to select this option during the installation.

2. Installation of Chamilo LMS


The following directories need to be readable, writeable and executable for everyone: (where 'chamilo' is the directory in which you installed Chamilo)

On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can use the CHMOD 777 command for this (although we recommend you seek advice from an experienced system administrator). In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the folders (by right-clicking on them).

2.5. The following files need to be readable and writeable for the web browser, only during the installation process:

On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can use the CHMOD 666 command for this (although we recommend you seek advice from an experienced system administrator). In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the files and folders (by right-clicking on them).

NOTES:
Do not modify the home_*.html files directly. Instead, choose "Configure the homepage" in the Chamilo administration section.

Windows : with combination packages like XAMPP, out of the box, login and password for MySQL should probably remain empty.

Configuration and security after installation


PHP configuration

To get the best of Chamilo, you need to finetune PHP settings. Consider :
max_execution_time = 300    ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 600 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 256M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)
post_max_size = 64M
upload_max_filesize = 100M

Some users could meet problems if their PHP settings don't fit these ones:

Past Chamilo versions required register_globals to be set to On. This is no longer necessary, this can be set to Off and Chamilo will work fine.

Note: if you are using PHP 5.3 or higher, you need to set your date.timezone setting to whatever your server's timezone is. For example, if your server is in the 'America/New_York' timezone, set this in your php.ini:

date.timezone = 'America/New_York'

BSD users: these php libraries have to be included during php installation:

You might also add the following php modules and packages:


3. Upgrade from a previous version of Chamilo/Dokeos

Before upgrading we heavily recommend you do a full backup of the previous Chamilo/Dokeos directories and databases. If you are unsure how to achieve this please ask your hosting provider for advice.

3.1 Upgrading from Dokeos 1.8.x

If you upgrade from Dokeos 1.8.x : 
* Styles and images are located in the main/css or main/img directories. You can still recover them from your backup if you have made it. Any modified style or image that uses the default style/image name will be overwritten by the next step. To avoid loosing your customisations, always ensure you copy the styles/images under a new name and use and modify the copy, not the original. The original will always be overwritten by newer versions. In Dokeos 1.8.5, we have changed the name of several CSS themes. Backwards compatibility is ensured by the fact that an upgrade only adds the new themes, but you should try and use these new themes rather than sticking to the old ones which will be deprecated shortly (not maintained).

3.2 Upgrading from Dokeos 1.6.x

If you upgrade from a lower version of Dokeos (1.6.x), the first and most important thing to do is to *move* your current directory to another place.
An easy way to do that is to create a subdirectory called "old_version" in your current Chamilo/Dokeos directory and move everything in there using a simple "move" command (i.e. under Linux: mkdir old_version; mv * old_verion/), then make the old_version/ directory writeable by the web server so that courses/ and upload/ directories can be moved from the old to the new installation.

The complete process is as follow:
NOTE: The upgrade from 1.6.x to 1.8.x implies a revision of the customised graphics and styles. The new version uses a complete new set of icons and styles, which means the ones from version 1.6 cannot be simply reused. The good news is the version 1.8.x allows you to create your own style in a separate css folder, that you can then reuse through all the 1.8.x versions

WARNING:
Do not delete the previous Chamilo/Dokeos installation directory before installing the new one. When the update is successfully finished, you can remove the old path.

NOTE:
Do not modify the home_*.html files directly. Instead, choose "Configure the homepage" in the Chamilo administration section.

3.3 In both cases

The following directories need to be readable, writeable and executable for the web server: On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can quick-fix this using the CHMOD 777 command, but if you are unsure, we recommend you seek advice for your own OS on our forum. In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the folders.

3.4 Quick-upgrade from 1.6.x guide for Linux

The following quick-upgrade guide assumes that:
On the command-line, type:
Then:

4. Troubleshooting

If you have problems, go to the Chamilo website and ask a question on the support forum. Please read the previous messages first to see if there is already an answer to your question. We also maintain a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

5. Administration section

To access the Chamilo administration section, open browser, go to your Chamilo adress and log in with the admin user. Then you will see a "Platform admin section" link in the header of the web page. There you can manage users, courses, sessions, portal look and feel, homepage content, course categories etc. 

6. LDAP

This part is optional, only organisations with an LDAP server will need to read this.
An LDAP module is already provided in Chamilo, but it has to be configured to make it work.

Compiling

Linux servers: It's possible that you have to recompile php with ldap support. Newer distributions also allow downloading rpms for additional packages.

Activating LDAP in Chamilo

In (chamilo folder)/main/inc/conf/configuration.php, around line 90, you see
//for new login module
//uncomment these to activate ldap
//$extAuthSource['ldap']['login'] = "./main/auth/ldap/login.php";
//$extAuthSource['ldap']['newUser'] = "./main/auth/ldap/newUser.php";

remove the // from the last two lines to activate LDAP.

Settings

Ask the LDAP server admin for the settings:

Since 1.8.5, you have to change the LDAP settings inside the "Portal administration" panel, under "Chamilo configuration settings", section "LDAP".
As an example, you should find the following kind of values:
LDAP main server's address: "myldapserver.com"; // your ldap server
LDAP main server's port: 389; // your ldap server's port number
LDAP domain: "dc=xx, dc=yy, dc=zz"; //domain

Teacher/student status

By default, Chamilo will check if the "employeenumber" field has a value. If it has, then Chamilo will consider this user as being a teacher.
If you want to change this behaviour, you can edit main/auth/ldap/authldap.php, function ldap_put_user_info_locally(), and change the if (empty($info_array[$tutor_field])) condition to whatever suits you.
You can also remove this check by removing the condition and leaving only the $status = STUDENT; line.

Protected LDAP servers

Some LDAP servers do not support anonymous use of the directory services.
In this case, you should fill in the appropriate fields in the administration panel (e.g. "manager" and "mypassword") and Chamilo will try to authenticate using these, or fall back to anonymous mode before giving up.

LDAP import into sessions

There is a new set of scripts now that allow you to insert users from LDAP directly into a Chamilo session. This, however, relies on a set of static choices in the LDAP contact attributes.
The fields used intensively by the Chamlio module are:

7. Mathematical formulas with LaTeX

This part is optional, only organisations planning to use mathematical formulas inside the online editor might want to read this.

You can enable mathematical equations writing inside the Chamilo online editor (FCKEditor) by applying the following steps:

As a result of this procedure, a new button becomes available in your Chamilo online editor, that gives you possibility to insert mathematical formulas into your documents.


Contact address
Mail: info@chamilo.org

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