Cloning Large Moodle Sites for Testing or Development

Large Moodle clones can consume enormous amounts of disk space and time. This guide identifies which tables and directories can safely be skipped for development or testing, and shows how to recreate missing tables afterward.

What to Skip When Cloning Large Sites

Some customers have very large Moodle installations, with literally hundreds of Gigabytes worth of data. In that case, you can skip:

• The moodledata directory (you won’t be able to see any uploaded files such as scorms, videos or pictures though)
• The mdl_files table when creating a database dump, as well as
• the mdl_logstore_standard_log table

Recreating the Omitted Tables

If you’ve got a database dump without the mdl_files and mdl_logstore_standard_log tables, you need to recreate them in your own copy of the database. Use these SQL statements to do so:

CREATE TABLE `mdl_files` (
  `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `contenthash` varchar(40) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `pathnamehash` varchar(40) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `contextid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `component` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `filearea` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `itemid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `filepath` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `filename` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `userid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  `filesize` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `mimetype` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `status` bigint(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `source` longtext COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci,
  `author` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `license` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `timecreated` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `timemodified` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `sortorder` bigint(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `referencefileid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci COMMENT='description of files, content is stored in sha1 file pool' ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;

--
-- Indexes for dumped tables
--

--
-- Indexes for table `mdl_files`
--
ALTER TABLE `mdl_files`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  ADD UNIQUE KEY `mdl_file_pat_uix` (`pathnamehash`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_comfilconite_ix` (`component`,`filearea`,`contextid`,`itemid`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_con_ix` (`contenthash`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_lic_ix` (`license`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_con2_ix` (`contextid`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_use_ix` (`userid`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_file_ref_ix` (`referencefileid`);

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for dumped tables
--

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for table `mdl_files`
--
ALTER TABLE `mdl_files`
  MODIFY `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT;




CREATE TABLE `mdl_logstore_standard_log` (
  `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `eventname` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `component` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `action` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `target` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `objecttable` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `objectid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  `crud` varchar(1) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `edulevel` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
  `contextid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `contextlevel` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `contextinstanceid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `userid` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `courseid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  `relateduserid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL,
  `anonymous` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `other` longtext COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci,
  `timecreated` bigint(10) NOT NULL,
  `origin` varchar(10) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `ip` varchar(45) COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `realuserid` bigint(10) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci COMMENT='Standard log table' ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;

--
-- Indexes for dumped tables
--

--
-- Indexes for table `mdl_logstore_standard_log`
--
ALTER TABLE `mdl_logstore_standard_log`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_logsstanlog_tim_ix` (`timecreated`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_logsstanlog_couanotim_ix` (`courseid`,`anonymous`,`timecreated`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_logsstanlog_useconconcr_ix` (`userid`,`contextlevel`,`contextinstanceid`,`crud`,`edulevel`,`timecreated`),
  ADD KEY `mdl_logsstanlog_con_ix` (`contextid`);

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for dumped tables
--

--
-- AUTO_INCREMENT for table `mdl_logstore_standard_log`
--
ALTER TABLE `mdl_logstore_standard_log`
  MODIFY `id` bigint(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT;