Moodle architecture - the LAMP/WAMP stack

Moodle is a web application running typically (but not exclusively) in a web browser. A Moodle user interacts with a user interface on a client computer. The client requests resources from the application server (generally known as middleware) that provides the requested resources. It can do so by calling on another server, known as the data server. The data server provides the application server with the data it requires:

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) for more information on the stack.

Generally, this architecture is referred to either as a WAMP stack or LAMP stack, the W or L referring to Windows or Linux, depending on the operating system you are running. A is for the web server Apache, M for the database server MySQL, and P for PHP, the scripting language Moodle is authored in. It should be noted that other web servers and databases are available and Moodle will run quite happily on them; refer to the online Moodle documentation.

Setting up an Internet ready Moodle server is beyond the scope of this book--see Moodle 3.0 Administration, also from Packt, for details. Instead, we will install a local web server running on Windows, using WampServer.