How To Install LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 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 Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip

Step 3. Installing LimeSurvey.

Download the latest stable version of LimeSurvey, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.64.1:

wget https://www.limesurvey.org/stable-release?download=2015:limesurvey2641%20170310zip
unzip "stable-release?download=2015:limesurvey2641 170310zip"
mv limesurvey/ /var/www/html/limesurvey/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

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

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB.

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 the 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;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON limesurvey.* TO 'limeuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for LimeSurvey.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘limesurvey.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/limesurvey.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/limesurvey.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/limesurvey.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/limesurvey.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/limesurvey/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/limesurvey/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing LimeSurvey.

LimeSurvey will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/admin or http://server-ip/admin 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 leading free online survey app on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official LimeSurvey website.

Save