Installing Moodle on Azure App Service

Geoffrey van Wyk 6

When I try to install Moodle on Azure App Service, the web page that shows the progress with the installation times out. Normally, as Moodle installs each component, the component's name will be added to the screen, and the spinner next to the web page title in the web browser tab keeps spinning until all components have been installed and a Continue button appears at the bottom of the page.

On Azure App Service, the spinner stops after maybe a minute, and nothing happens on the page. The web server must have given up waiting on PHP.

Installing via the commandline does not work either, because the command output also freezes. When connecting to the App Service container via Azure Cloud Shell and Windows Terminal, the Windows Terminal tab with Azure Cloud Shell, just closes itself as well after a minute or two.

I am beginning to think it is impossible to install Moodle on Azure App Service. Has anyone else had success?

Ryan Hill 28,191 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-02-20T01:32:53.847+00:00

Which predefined deployment option did you use @Geoffrey van Wyk ? I can see if I can repro. Also, if you used any ARM templates, let me know which ones.
Simon@Aspire 1 Reputation point

2022-02-21T09:41:41.587+00:00

It appears OP is trying to do the same thing we are. We already have a MySQL server instance which we planned to place the database on and then use Linux/PHP App Service to run the Moodle instance with a 'Mapped Path' to a storage account for the data directory. In this configuration the issue presents the same, you can add the files, the database, etc but when you run the install script it goes through the basics but simply stops during the installation of the components.

My original through was that this has something to do with the data directory mapping but I have confirmed the setup process does add files and folders to the storage account as expect. Then we had the idea that it might be the PHP timeouts so we implemented a 10min execution timeout using the systems directives instructions here. This made no difference.

We took a look at the predefined deployments but all of these are VM based and we are trying to move away IaaS in favour of PaaS for everything.
Geoffrey van Wyk 6 Reputation points

2022-02-22T06:13:09.357+00:00

Hi @Ryan Hill , I did not use that repository, just an app service directly.
Ryan Hill 28,191 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2022-02-23T16:44:50.897+00:00

@Geoffrey van Wyk @Simon@Aspire are you using these installation steps (I'm not familiar with Moodle)? Is your app service hosted in Windows or Linux? Which Moodle component does the timeout occur on?
Duran Chen 1 Reputation point

2022-08-29T08:46:08.443+00:00

Hi @Geoffrey van Wyk ，

Recently we are considering to move Moodle from VM to Azure App Service，have you run moodle on Azure App Service yet？
Looking forward to your reply， thanks.

Regards
Duran Chen
Sandeep Gadey 0 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2023-04-14T16:35:38.89+00:00

Hi @Duran Chen @Geoffrey van Wyk , Where you able to deploy on app services?

1 answer

Ross Bell 1 Reputation point

2022-11-25T03:00:30.81+00:00

Hi, dropping the PHP version on the app service to version 7.* worked for me.

Once I changed the PHP version install pages were formatted nicer. Had to check out an older version, (not 400 stable) as there were some warnings about
SQL version on 400.

Hope this helps.
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Installing Moodle on Azure App Service

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