Installation And Configuration Of  RainLoop Webmail Client With Nginx On Ubuntu 14.04 

Version 1.0
Author: Srijan Kishore

This document describes how to install and configure Rainloop on Ubuntu 14.04. We will use nginx as web server. Rainloop is a popular free Open Source Web Application primarily written in PHP. It offers users a swift and contemporary web interface for accessing emails on a majority of commonly used domain mail providers such as Outlook, Yahoo, and Gmail, in addition to local mail servers. Rainloop also doubles up as a Mail User Agent (MUA) by accessing domain mail via IMAP/ SMTP protocols. This tutorial explains the process of installing Rainloop Webmail on an Ubuntu 14.04 Virtual Private Server using Nginx and MariaDB.

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial is based on Ubuntu 14.04 server, so you should set up a basic Ubuntu 14.04 server installation before you continue with this tutorial. The system should have a static IP address. I use 192.168.0.100 as my IP address in this tutorial and server1.example.com as the hostname.

2 Installation of Mariadb

This method provides the options for Contact feature in Rainloop. Rainloop installation requires specific Mariadb, here I will be installing Mariadb-10.0.12 as follows:

apt-get -y update && apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get install python-software-properties curl

We will first download the release key associated with the Mariadb :

apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xcbcb082a1bb943db

add-apt-repository 'deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/mariadb/repo/10.0/ubuntu trusty main'
apt-get -y update
echo -e "Package: *\nPin: origin ftp.osuosl.org\nPin-Priority: 1000" | tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mariadb

apt-get install mariadb-server

New password for the MariaDB "root" user: <--mariadbpassword
Repeat password for the MariaDB "root" user: <--mariadbpassword

Now we will create the database required for the Rainloop:

mysql -uroot -p

In Mariadb prompt we will enter Rainloop details as database=rainloopdb, user=rainloopuser and password=rainlooppassword;

create database rainloopdb;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON rainloopdb.* TO 'rainloopuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'rainlooppassword';
flush privileges;
quit

3 Installing PHP and Nginx

This step requires users to install PHP and Nginx,

apt-get install nginx php5-fpm  php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-cli php5-curl php5-sqlite

4 Installing and configuring Rainloop

Next, we must create a root directory for our web site, in addition to deploying the most recent version of the application, as shown below:

mkdir -p /var/www/rainloop/{public_html,logs}
cd /var/www/rainloop/public_html/
curl -s http://repository.rainloop.net/installer.php | php

root@server1:/var/www/rainloop/public_html# curl -s http://repository.rainloop.net/installer.php | php
#!/usr/bin/env php


       [RainLoop Webmail Installer]


 * Connecting to repository ...
 * Downloading package ...
 * Complete downloading!
 * Installing package ...
 * Complete installing!

 * [Success] Installation is finished!

root@server1:/var/www/rainloop/public_html#

Now we will create the rainloop configuration file and add the entries like explained below:

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop

Give the entries like this:

server {
    server_name rainloop;
    listen 80;
    root /var/www/rainloop/public_html;
    access_log /var/www/rainloop/logs/access.log;
    error_log /var/www/rainloop/logs/error.log;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
        fastcgi_keep_conn on;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

    location ^~ /data {
      deny all;
    }

}

Now, we will symlink it and, subsequently restart the server, as shown below:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rainloop

Restart the NGINX service:

service nginx restart

The Rainloop must have appropriate permissions, as follows:

chown -R www-data: /var/www/rainloop/public_html/

Now we can access the administrator panel at http://192.168.0.100/?admin, user=admin and Password=12345

5 Links

• rainloop : http://rainloop.net/
• Ubuntu : http://www.ubuntu.com/