RoundCube webmail installation

RoundCube Installation

I will install RoundCube into the directory /opt/roundcube to ensure that this installation will not collide with any Debian system packages. The first step is to install wget, create the directory /opt/roundcube and download the latest RoundCube version with wget into this directory. The current RoundCube version is 1.1.3 at the time that I write this tutorial, take a look at theRoundCube website to check if there is a later version that you can use.

Login as root user on the shell of your server, then install wget and the nano editor:

apt-get install wget nano

Create the directory and enter it with the "cd" command:

mkdir /opt/roundcube
cd /opt/roundcube

Download the RoundCube tar.gz file and unpack it:

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/roundcubemail/roundcubemail/1.1.3/roundcubemail-1.1.3-complete.tar.gz
tar xfz roundcubemail-1.1.3-complete.tar.gz

The RoundCube files are now in the folder /opt/roundcube/roundcubemail-1.1.3. The next step is to move them one directory up to /opt/roundcube.

mv roundcubemail-1.1.3/* .
mv roundcubemail-1.1.3/.htaccess .

The dot at the end of the two commands is required and part of the command, don't miss it! Delete the empty directory and the tar.gz file.

rmdir roundcubemail-1.1.3
rm roundcubemail-1.1.3-complete.tar.gz

And change the owner of all files to the user the Apache server is running as.

chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/roundcube

Install the RoundCube Database

Roundcube requires a database to store mailbox settings, contacts, etc. I will use MySQL (or MariaDB) here as database backend. We will now create a database with the name "roundcubemail" and a user with the name "roundcube" in MySQL.

Login to the MySQL server with the following command:

mysql --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf

Then execute the following commands on the MySQl database shell to create the database and database user. Replace the word "secretpassword" in the commands below with a password of your choice.

CREATE DATABASE roundcubemail;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON roundcubemail.* TO roundcube@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secretpassword';
flush privileges;
quit

Now we will import the RoundCube tables from the file mysql.initial.sql into our new database.

Run the following command on the Linux shell:

mysql --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf roundcubemail < /opt/roundcube/SQL/mysql.initial.sql

Configure RoundCube and Apache

In this step, we will configure the database details in RoundCube and add a RoundCube configuration file in Apache.

I'll start with the database configuration in RoundCube. Run the following commands to create a new config.inc.php file based on the sample configuration file and open it in the nano editor.

cd /opt/roundcube/config
cp -pf config.inc.php.sample config.inc.php
nano config.inc.php

Find the database configuration line that starts with $config['db_dsnw'] and replace it with the following line:

$config['db_dsnw'] = 'mysql://roundcube:secretpassword@localhost/roundcubemail';

The word "secretpassword" has to be replaced with the password that you have chosen for the database.

Next search for the "smtp_server" line and set the hostname of your SMTP server here. In my case, the mail server is the local server, so I'll set the server to "localhost".

$config['smtp_server'] = 'localhost';

Now it's time to configure Apache. I'll create a new configuration file roundcube.conf in the folder /etc/apache2/conf-available/.

nano /etc/apache2/conf-available/roundcube.conf

Add the following lines to that file and save it.

Alias /roundcube /opt/roundcube
Alias /webmail /opt/roundcube

<Directory /opt/roundcube>
 Options +FollowSymLinks
 # AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
 AddType text/x-component .htc
 
 <IfModule mod_php5.c>
 AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
 php_flag display_errors Off
 php_flag log_errors On
 # php_value error_log logs/errors
 php_value upload_max_filesize 10M
 php_value post_max_size 12M
 php_value memory_limit 64M
 php_flag zlib.output_compression Off
 php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
 php_flag magic_quotes_runtime Off
 php_flag zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off
 php_flag suhosin.session.encrypt Off
 #php_value session.cookie_path /
 php_flag session.auto_start Off
 php_value session.gc_maxlifetime 21600
 php_value session.gc_divisor 500
 php_value session.gc_probability 1
 </IfModule>

 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteRule ^favicon\.ico$ skins/larry/images/favicon.ico
 # security rules:
 # - deny access to files not containing a dot or starting with a dot
 # in all locations except installer directory
 RewriteRule ^(?!installer)(\.?[^\.]+)$ - [F]
 # - deny access to some locations
 RewriteRule ^/?(\.git|\.tx|SQL|bin|config|logs|temp|tests|program\/(include|lib|localization|steps)) - [F]
 # - deny access to some documentation files
 RewriteRule /?(README\.md|composer\.json-dist|composer\.json|package\.xml)$ - [F]
 </IfModule>

 <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
 </IfModule>

 <IfModule mod_expires.c>
 ExpiresActive On
 ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
 </IfModule>

 FileETag MTime Size

 <IfModule mod_autoindex.c>
 Options -Indexes
 </ifModule>

 AllowOverride None
 Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /opt/roundcube/plugins/enigma/home>
 Options -FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /opt/roundcube/config>
 Options -FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /opt/roundcube/temp>
 Options -FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /opt/roundcube/logs>
 Options -FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Require all denied
</Directory>

The 2 Alias lines in the first two lines make RoundCube available as /roundcube and /webmail on your server.

Enable the configuration and reload apache:

a2enconf roundcube
service apache2 reload

That's it, RoundCube is now fully installed on your server, and you can reach it on the server IP and hostname trough the aliases /roundcube and /webmail. The IP of my server is 192.168.1.100; for that I can open RoundCube with http://192.168.1.100/webmail