How To Install RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RainLoop is a fast and lightweight e-mail client software that supports protocols such as IMAP, SSL, SMTP, etc. RainLoop allows the user to log in with multiple e-mail accounts even with different browser tabs. It can also be integrated with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, etc.

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 RainLoop Webmail on an Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic beaver).

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 RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 18.04 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.

An 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 php7.2 libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-common php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-soap php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-intl php7.2-mysql php7.2-cli php7.2-zip php7.2-curl

Step 3. Installing RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we will install the free and open-source community edition. Now Download a Rainloop Webmail package from the terminal using wget command:

wget http://www.rainloop.net/repository/webmail/rainloop-community-latest.zip

Next, let’s create a new directory for our RainLoop webmail installation:

sudo mkdir /var/www/rainloop

To extract the files into this new directory, run the following command:

unzip rainloop-community-latest.zip -d /var/www/rainloop

We will need to change some folders permissions:

cd /var/www/rainloop
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
chown -R www-data:www-data .

Step 4. Configuring Apache web server for RainLoop Webmail.

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

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

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName webmail.mydomain.com
  DocumentRoot "/var/www/rainloop/"

  ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/rainloop_error_log"
  TransferLog "/var/log/apache2/rainloop_access_log"

  <Directory />
    Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
    Require all granted
  </Directory>

  <Directory /var/www/rainloop/data>
    Options -Indexes
    Deny from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

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

sudo a2ensite vtiger.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 5. Accessing RainLoop Webmail.

RainLoop Webmail will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://webmail.my-domain.com/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.

The default admin login credentials are:

Username: admin
Password: 12345

Congratulations! You have successfully installed RainLoop. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing RainLoop Webmail on your Ubuntu 18.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official RainLoop website.