How To Install LimeSurvey on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of LimeSurvey on your CentOS 7.  For those of you who didn’t know, LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open-source online survey application. It has been widely used by many big industries to create survey tasks. It has many powerful features like creating dynamic fields for the survey. Supports multilingual, define user roles, user groups, and more it has been integrated into various CMS. The LimeSurvey team provides the commercial for those who are seeking. As well as community support for its users.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of LimeSurvey on a CentOS 7 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install LimeSurvey on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum clean all
yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:

yum install php-mysql php-gd php-ldap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt curl zlib libtool-ltdl php-pdo

Step 3. Installing LimeSurvey.

The first thing to do is to go to LimeSurvey’s download page and download the latest stable version of LimeSurvey, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.50:

wget http://download.limesurvey.org/latest-stable-release/limesurvey250plus-build160614.tar.gz

Unpack the LimeSurvey archive to the document root directory on your server:

tar -xzvf limesurvey250plus-build160614.tar.gz
mv limesurvey /var/www/html/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown apache:apache -R /var/www/html/limesurvey/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for LimeSurvey.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for LimeSurvey. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for LimeSurvey installation:

CREATE DATABASE limesurvey_db;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on limesurvey_db.* to 'limesurvey_user'@'localhost' identified by 'YoUrPaS$w0rD';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for LimeSurvey.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your LimeSurvey website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf
IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/limesurvey/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/limesurvey/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 6. Accessing LimeSurvey.

LimeSurvey will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://your-server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed LimeSurvey. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing LimeSurvey on CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official LimeSurvey website.

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