Escaping Plugin Dependency Hell

Moodle has a feature that allows a plugin to declare that it is dependent on another plugin. This is nice because it prevents you installing something that won’t work, or that might cause havoc. Unfortunately this can get people in trouble because Moodle will keep returning you to the  “plugin dependencies check” page, until they remove the new plugin or install the dependent plugin.

The “plugin dependencies check” screen may look like this:

Note the red highlighted text on the lower right. That is the plugin that is missing or has the wrong version.

To install that plugin, or update it with a newer version, you will probably want to use the same method that you used to install the problem plugin, ie the one that is holding everything up. So in this case if “PoodLL Anywhere” was installed via FTP, you would want to install the “PoodLL Filter” via FTP also. For this rest of this post we will assume that you want to do all this using Moodle’s admin interface. (ie not FTP or GIT)

These days people like to use the Moodle automated plugin install and upgrade features. If all you need to do is update the dependent plugin to a newer version, and you installed it directly from Moodle’s plugin database then you will want to visit :
http://YOUR-MOODLE-URL/admin/plugins.php and install the update. As in the screenshot.

However if you need to install the missing plugin afresh, or you can not update from here, then you will want to visit

http://YOUR-MOODLE-URL/admin/tool/installaddon

From here you can either head off to Moodle.org and select the plugin to install, or you can drag and drop a previously downloaded zip file into the upload area and install your plugin.

And hopefully that will get you out of plugin dependency hell. You might also view this video of me performing the entire process.

[youtube clipid=”j9zLEMJBd-o” autoplay=”0″]