ℹ️ About Alpine Moodle

A lightweight Moodle Docker image built on Alpine Linux.

Attribution

This documentation is a fork of erseco/alpine-moodle. The upstream documentation is available here.

What is this image?

ruseler/alpine-moodle packages Moodle into a single, small (~250 MB) container based on ruseler/alpine-php-webserver. It runs Nginx + PHP-FPM under a non-privileged user, includes Moosh CLI, and is configured entirely through environment variables.

Highlights:

• PHP 8.3 FPM with ondemand process manager — low idle footprint
• Works with PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, or SQLite (single-container dev mode)
• Optional Redis session handler for HA deployments
• Supports Moodle 4.x, 5.0, 5.1 (with /public directory) and main branch
• Internal cron via runit (configurable)
• Logs go straight to docker logs
• Extensible via pre/post configuration hooks and POST_CONFIGURE_COMMANDS

Where to start

• 🚀 Quick Start — Get a Moodle instance running in under a minute.
• 🐳 Docker Compose — Practical stacks for dev, production, and proxied setups.
• 🔒 Reverse Proxy — Traefik, Nginx, NPM, Apache, Caddy recipes.
• 🗄️ Environment Variables — Every supported knob, with defaults.
• 💾 Persistence & Volumes — What to mount and what to back up.
• 🔄 Upgrading — How to move between Moodle versions safely.
• 💡 Troubleshooting — Solutions to the most common deployment issues.
• ❓ FAQ — Short answers to recurring questions.

Minimal example

docker run -d \
  -p 80:8080 \
  -e MOODLE_DATABASE_TYPE=sqlite3 \
  -e MOODLE_PASSWORD=ChangeMe123! \
  -v moodledata:/var/www/moodledata \
  ruseler/alpine-moodle

Open http://localhost and log in with moodleuser / ChangeMe123!.

SQLite is for development and demos only

Use PostgreSQL or MariaDB for any real deployment. See Docker Compose for production-grade examples.

Project links

• Source code: https://github.com/AdrianoRuseler/alpine-moodle
• Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/ruseler/alpine-moodle
• GitHub Container Registry: ghcr.io/ruseler/alpine-moodle
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/AdrianoRuseler/alpine-moodle/issues

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This documentation is a fork of erseco/alpine-moodle. The upstream documentation is available here.