Server Requirements
Before installing Chamilo 3.0, verify that your server meets the following requirements.
Software Requirements
PHP
PHP version
8.3
8.5
Required PHP Extensions
bcmath
Arbitrary-precision math
ctype
Character type checking
curl
HTTP requests (API integrations, external services)
dom, libxml, simplexml, xml, xmlreader
XML parsing and DOM handling (SCORM, RSS, SOAP, LTI)
exif
Reading image metadata (e.g. auto-orienting uploaded photos)
fileinfo
MIME type detection for uploaded files
gd
Image processing (thumbnails, CAPTCHA)
iconv
Character set conversion
intl
Internationalization (date, number, and string formatting)
json
JSON encoding/decoding
ldap
LDAP connector. Although you will probably not use LDAP, Chamilo requires it
mbstring
Multibyte string handling (UTF-8 support)
openssl
Cryptographic operations (HTTPS, password hashing, JWT tokens)
pdo, plus pdo_mysql or pdo_pgsql
Database connectivity (install the driver matching your database)
soap
SOAP web service handling
zip
Handling ZIP archives (SCORM packages, bulk imports/exports)
zlib
Compression used internally by several dependencies
apcu
User-level caching (recommended, checked but not enforced by the installer)
opcache
Opcode caching (strongly recommended for performance, checked but not enforced by the installer)
xapian
Full-text search (optional, only if you use search)
Database
MariaDB
10.0
10.4 or higher
MySQL
5.7
8.0 or higher
MariaDB versions older than 10.2.2 (and MySQL versions older than 5.7) need large index/prefix support enabled manually in the server configuration before installing Chamilo.
Web Server
Apache
Requires mod_rewrite (and ssl, headers, expires) enabled. Chamilo ships a sample vhost at public/main/install/apache.dist.conf.
Nginx
Requires manual configuration for URL rewriting — Chamilo does not ship a sample Nginx config. See the Symfony Nginx documentation for a reference configuration.
Build Tools
Composer (^2.8)
PHP dependency management. Required to install Chamilo's PHP libraries.
Node.js (20+ LTS)
JavaScript runtime. Required to build frontend assets.
Yarn (^4, via Corepack)
JavaScript package manager used to build frontend assets (yarn install, yarn encore production).
Hardware Requirements
RAM
4 GB
8 GB or more (building frontend assets from source needs at least 4 GB on its own)
CPU
2 vCPUs
2+ cores
Disk space
4 GB (application only)
20+ GB (including uploaded content); building from source needs ~10 GB free during the build
Disk type
HDD
SSD (significantly improves database and cache performance)
These are baseline figures from Chamilo's own installation guide. Actual requirements depend on the number of concurrent users and the volume of content hosted.
Operating System
Linux
Recommended. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS+, Debian 12+, AlmaLinux 9+, or equivalent.
Windows
Possible but not thoroughly tested. Use WSL2 for development.
macOS
Development only / untested.
Network Requirements
A domain name pointing to your server.
An SSL/TLS certificate for HTTPS (Let's Encrypt provides free certificates).
Outbound SMTP access if sending emails directly (or use a third-party email service).
Port 443 (HTTPS) and optionally port 80 (HTTP, for redirect to HTTPS).
Checking Requirements
After placing the Chamilo source on your server, you can check your PHP configuration directly:
Tips
Use PHP-FPM with Apache or Nginx for better performance than mod_php.
Separate your database onto a dedicated server for platforms expecting more than 500 concurrent users.
Use SSD storage -- Database-heavy applications like Chamilo benefit significantly from fast disk I/O.
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