@TODO This is only a draft. Review before the final .0 release and update the information accordingly.
Mahara is an open source ePortfolio system. An ePortfolio is a type of web application that allows learners to record and share evidence of their learning and reflect on their learning. Mahara can be used to create different types of portfolios, including learning portfolio, development portfolio, presentation / showcase portfolio, employability portfolio.
For more information about Mahara and ePortfolios, see the Mahara manual's introduction chapter.
The best ways for obtaining support are:
- Mahara online manual
- Mahara community forums
- Mahara wiki
- Live chat with others, in particular developers
For detailed installation instructions see the installation page on our wiki.
The following is a check list of the high level installation and setup steps. Please refer to the installation instructions for the details:
- Create a PostgreSQL or MySQL database for Mahara.
- Copy the Mahara files under 'htdocs' into your web root.
- Create a Mahara 'dataroot' directory outside of your web root.
- Copy htdocs/config-dist.php to config.php.
- Edit config.php with the correct details for your installation.
Mahara 23.04 supports direct upgrades from previous Mahara versions 20.04.0 and later.
If you are upgrading from an earlier version, you will need to upgrade in steps:
- if site version begins with 1.X, first upgrade to 15.04
- then/else upgrade version to 17.04.10
- then/else upgrade version to 18.04.6
- then/else upgrade version to 20.04.5
- then upgrade to 23.04.X (latest stable release)
Note: Older versions of Mahara are not compatible with latest versions of PHP. You will need to do intermediate upgrade steps before updating your server's PHP.
To upgrade an existing Mahara installation, follow the upgrade instructions.
If you upgrade from Mahara 15.10 or earlier, you will need to add a 'urlsecret' value to your config.php file if you wish to use the web-based upgrade and/or cron scripts. See:
Here are the system requirements needed to run Mahara 23.04.
Mahara is officially supported on Ubuntu (18.04/"Bionic Beaver" LTS or later) and Debian (9.0/"Stretch" LTS or later). However, it will run on other Linux- based operating systems or even Windows servers. You may run into issues though that the Mahara core project team may not be able to fix. Patches are welcome to.
Note: This version of Mahara has not been tested on Debian 12+ or Ubuntu 22.04+.
Any operating system that supports modern web browsers with JavaScript can be used to interact with Mahara.
Mahara is supported on Apache 2 or later and tested on Nginx, although it will probably run on any web server with the proper PHP extensions.
Mahara requires either PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB. It would require extensive modification to support other databases.
- PostgreSQL 9.4 or later
- MySQL 5.7 or later
- MariaDB 10.1 or later
Note: This version of Mahara has not been tested on PostgreSQL 13+ and MariaDB 10.8+ versions.
Mahara can be used with PHP version 7.2.X, 7.3.X, or 7.4.X. The 'magic_quotes' and 'register_globals' settings should be turned off (which is the default on modern PHP installations).
Note: Mahara has not been fully tested with PHP 8.X. Some aspects of Mahara may not function as expected. Plans are in place to support PHP 8.1.
The following PHP extensions are also required:
- curl
- gd (including Freetype support)
- json
- ldap
- libxml
- mbstring
- mime_magic; or fileinfo
- pgsql; or mysqli; or mysql
- session
- SimpleXML
- intl - for language internationalisation
- bz2 (optional)
- imagick (optional)
- openssl and xmlrpc (optional; for networking support)
- memcached (optional; for SAML auth plugin)
- zlib (optional)
- adodb (optional; improves performance)
- enchant or pspell (optional; for TinyMCE spellcheck button)
Mahara should be accessible in any modern web browser with JavaScript support. However, it is only actively tested in the most recent versions of Firefox and Chrome (also on Android). Testing on Safari (also for iOS) is done on occasion, Microsoft browsers, i.e. Microsoft Edge, are supported to a maximum of the three most recent versions that are officially supported by Microsoft.
You can still use Mahara on older browsers, but may not have all functionality available.
For Mahara 23.04, the supported browser versions are:
- Firefox 99.0
- Chrome 88.0
- Safari 13.1
- MS Edge 100.0
- Safari for iOS
- Chrome for Android
Mahara has been translated into many languages. You can download language packs, install and update them via CLI, or install and update them via the administration area in Mahara.
Document your customisations for easy record keeping in CUSTOMISATIONS.md by copying CUSTOMISATIONS-example.md. The file sits outside of the htdocs directory and should not be uploaded to a server.
Copyright (C) 2006-2023 Catalyst IT Limited and others
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3 or later of the License.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License 3.0+ along with this program (see the file 'COPYING'). If not, view the GNU GLP v.3+ online.
Additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7:
If you modify this program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with the OpenSSL project's OpenSSL library (or a modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the terms of the OpenSSL or SSLeay licenses, the Mahara copyright holders grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work. Corresponding Source for a non-source form of such a combination shall include the source code for the parts of OpenSSL used as well as that of the covered work.