Firstly, note that it is usually not necessary to import users in bulk - to keep your own maintenance work down you should first explore forms of authentication that do not require manual maintenance, such as connecting to existing external databases or letting the users create their own accounts. See the Authentication section in the admin menus.
If you are sure you want to import multiple user accounts from a text file, then you need to format your text file as follows:
Required fieldnames: these fields must be included in the first record, and defined for each user
firstname, lastname
Optional fieldnames: all of these are completely optional. If a values is present for the field in the file, then that value is used; else, the default value for that field is used.
institution, department, city, country, lang, auth, timezone, idnumber, icq, phone1, phone2, address, url, description, mailformat, maildisplay, htmleditor, autosubscribe, emailstop, deleted
Enrolment fieldnames (optional): The course names are the "shortnames" of the courses - if present then the user will be enrolled in those courses. For groups use group name; for roles use id. Group names must be associated to the corresponding courses, i.e. group1 to course1, etc.
course1, group1, type1, role1, course2, group2, type2, role2, etc.
Here is an example of a valid import file:
username, password, firstname, lastname, email, lang, idnumber, maildisplay, course1, group1, type1
jonest, verysecret, Tom, Jones, jonest@someplace.edu, en, 3663737, 1, Intro101, Section 1, 1
reznort, somesecret, Trent, Reznor, reznort@someplace.edu, en_us, 6736733, 0, Advanced202, Section 3, 3
The CSV file may contain full informations for some users and use default values for others (use extra commas to corectly associate data to headers). For example, the following file will use default values for username, city and country for user Trent Reznor:
username, password, firstname, lastname, country, city
jonest, verysecret, Tom, Jones, RO, Constanta
, somesecret, Trent, Reznor, ,
The default values are processed as templates in which the following codes are allowed:
%l
- will be replaced by the lastname%f
- will be replaced by the firstname%u
- will be replaced by the username%%
- will be replaced by the %Between the percent sign (%) and any code letter (l, f or u) the following modifiers are allowed:
For example, if the firstname is John and the lastname is Doe, the following values will be obtained with the specified templates:
Template processing is done only on default values, and not on the values retrieved from the CSV file.
In order to create corect Moodle usernames, the username is always converted to lowercase. Moreover, if the "Allow extended characters in usernames" option in the Site policies page is off, characters different to letters, digits, dash (-) and dot (.) are removed. For example if the firstname is John Jr. and the lastname is Doe, the username %-f_%-l will produce john jr._doe when Allow extended characters in usernames is on, and johnjr.doe when off.
When the "New username duplicate handling" setting is set to Append counter, an auto-increment counter will be append to duplicate usernames produced by the template. For example, if the CSV file contains the users named John Doe, Jane Doe and Jenny Doe without explicit usernames, the default username is %-1f%-l and New username duplicate handling is set to Append counter, then the usernames produced will be jdoe, jdoe2 and jdoe3.
By default Moodle assumes that you will be creating new user accounts, and skips records where the username matches an existing account. However, if you set "Update existing accounts" to Yes, the existing user account will be updated.
When updating existing accounts you can change usernames as well. Set "Allow renames" to Yes and include in your file a field called oldusername
.
Warning: any errors updating existing accounts can affect your users badly. Be careful when using the options to update.
If the deleted
field is present, users with value 1 for it will be deleted. In this case, all the fields may be omitted, except for username
(which should be present in the CSV file, or a default value for it should be available).
Deleting and uploading accounts could be done with a single CSV file. For example, the following file will add the user Tom Jones and delete the user reznort:
username, firstname, lastname, deleted
jonest, Tom, Jones, 0
reznort, , , 1