How To Install LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 18.04 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 surveys. 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 an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

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 update
sudo apt upgrade

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

A Ubuntu 18.04 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 php7.1-cli php7.1-mbstring php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl

Step 3. Installing LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 18.04.

Download the latest stable version of LimeSurvey, At the moment of writing this article it is version 3.15.6:

wget https://www.limesurvey.org/stable-release?download=2519:limesurvey3156%20190108zip
unzip "stable-release?download=2519:limesurvey3156 20190108zip"
mv limesurvey/ /var/www/html/limesurvey/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/limesurvey
chmod -R 755 /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:

sudo a2ensite limesurvey.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing the LimeSurvey Web Interface.

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-addreess/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 online survey platform based on PHP on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS  (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official LimeSurvey website.