Chamilo

This guide will take you through the process of installing the Chamilo e-learning portal, version 1.11.22 on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 22.04 64bit distribution

To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the notion of SSH keys and installing/configuring server software on Ubuntu.

Previous articles on this blog explain how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms, how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10, 1.10.* on Ubuntu 16.04 and 1.11.* on Ubuntu 17.04 and 20.04.

In recent years, the Chamilo LMS software we develop has grown in size, to something that many people might consider unreasonable (to some extent, we do too). This article explains why the Chamilo package for Chamilo 1.11.8 weighs 1100MB (yeah, 1.1GB!) or, in its compressed form, about 285MB. We've heard comments of many people about this. These usually go like this:

• a white page
• an error message about Twig
• if you have xdebug installed and showing error messages, something like this:

In this article, we'll talk about managing an LMS when all institutional assignments handed in by students have to be handed in through the LMS, and what that means if you have several thousand students. This case is based on one of our customers which provides in-class English courses to about 55,000 students in a monthly cycle. The institution started working with us in 2012, so it's already been 5 years since we've started developing their custom Chamilo LMS setup.

This article can be considered an update of our first article on installing Chamilo (on a Raspberry Pi B+). This time, we are testing it with Raspberry 3, as of the 1st of April 2017 (no joke intended). Last time, we were testing with Chamilo 1.9, which is arguably less load-intensive, considering it doesn't include any Symfony component, and it doesn't require any .htaccess configuration.

Ergonomics and usability with Chamilo LMS. Sometimes Open Source software gets criticized for lacking behind proprietary software when talking about compelling interfaces. Many people in our community, after spending years with other solutions, describe our software, Chamilo LMS, as the easiest to use and to manage. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what lead us there. This all starts with a simple act: caring about ergonomics from the start.

This guide will take you through the process of installing Chamilo 1.10 (from Github sources) for testing on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 16.04 distribution. A previous article on this blog explains how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms and another article explains how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10.