In this tutorial we will help you install Roundcube Webmail in Ubuntu 11.10/12.04 or any other Ubuntu version (11.04/10.10/10.04/Ubuntu Server). As a reminder, Roundcube Webmail is simply a webmail software written in PHP that can be used as e-mail client for managing your mail accounts. Roundcube is rich of features and configuration options, you can find them all here.Before we start the tutorial, you need to install a web server on Ubuntu (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.). You can find here a tutorial explaining how to install a LAMP server.
Roundcube Webmail Installation
After installing the LAMP web server on your system, you can now follow these instructions to install Roundcube Webmail on Ubuntu:
1. Creating A MySQL Database & User
Note: You can skip this first step if you want to install and create a MySQL database and user using phpMyAdmin.
- Open the terminal and run this command to sign in to your MySQL server (use the MySQL password you have entered during the installation of the LAMP server):
mysql -u root -p
- We will create a database for Roundcube Webmail called "roundcube" using this command (you can rename it to whatever you want):
create database roundcube;
- Create now a MySQL user with this commad (for this example, I have selected the same database name for this user.):
CREATE USER roundcube;
- Give this user a password with this command:
SET PASSWORD FOR 'roundcube' = PASSWORD('12345');
Replace text marked in red with your own username and password.
- Grant now this user all access privileges for this new database with this command:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON roundcube.* TO 'roundcube' IDENTIFIED BY '12345';
- Exit now the MySQL server with this command:
exit
2. Installing Roundcube Webmail
Note: We will install Roundcube Webmail in the /var/www/webmail directory, you can rename webmail to whatever you want.
- Via the terminal, download and extract the script files to the /var/www/webmail folder with the following commands:
cd /tmp && wget -O roundcubemail-0.7.1.tar.gz http://goo.gl/zGnGZ
sudo tar -xzvf roundcubemail-0.7.1.tar.gz -C /var/www
sudo mv /var/www/roundcubemail-0.7.1/ /var/www/webmail
- Make now these folders writable using these commands:
sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/webmail/temp
sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/webmail/logs
- Import now the MySQL file of RoundCube with this command:
mysql roundcube < /var/www/webmail/SQL/mysql.initial.sql
- To start the installation of Roundcube, open one of these links:
http://127.0.0.1/webmail/installer/
or
http://localhost/webmail/installer/
- In the welcome page, click START INSTALLATION:
- Click Next:
- In the next page, you need to enter your own configuration you want to use (SMTP & IMAP settings, etc.). If you want to manage your Gmail account with Roundcube Webmail, you can check this page for Gmail SMTP & IMAP settings. Then scroll down and fill your MySQL database details you have already created:
When you finish, click CREATE CONFIG.
- Two files will be generated: main.inc.php & db.inc.php, download and place them in the /var/www/webmail/config directory:
Then click Continue.
- The installation is now complete, remove the "installer" folder with this command:
sudo rm -r /var/www/webmail/installer
- You can now access Roundcube Webmail with one of these links, then sign in using your mail access details (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) to start managing your e-mail contacts:
http://127.0.0.1/webmail/
or
http://localhost/webmail/
- To edit the config file that contains the MYSQL details as well as other confiig options, you can edit later the db.inc.php file with this command:
sudo gedit /var/www/webmail/config/db.inc.php
That's it!