How To Install LimeSurvey on CentOS 6

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LimeSurvey on CentOS 6. 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. I will show you the step-by-step installation of LimeSurvey on CentOS 6.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 6.
• 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 CentOS 6

Step 1. First of all, make sure that all packages are up to date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server and include some PHP extensions.

yum install httpd httpd-devel 
yum install mysql mysql-server 
yum install php php-cli php-common php-devel php-pear php-gd php-mbstring php-mysql php-xml php-imap php-ldap php-zip php-zlib libtool-ltdl php-pdo

Start service Apache web server and MySQL also enable it to start on boot of the server:

service httpd start
service mysql start
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig mysqld on

Step 3. Install LimeSurvey.

Download the latest stable version of LimeSurvey, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.06:

wget http://download.limesurvey.org/latest-stable-release/limesurvey206plus-build150619.tar.gz && tar -xzvf limesurvey206plus-build150619.tar.gz
mv limesurvey /var/www/html/ && cd /var/www/html/ && chown -R apache: limesurvey/

Step 4. Configure MySQL Database for LimeSurvey.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL 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 MySQL.

mysql_secure_installation

Next, we will need to log in to the MySQL 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 MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for the LimeSurvey software:

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

Step 5. Configure Apache webserver.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache so you can access the LimeSurvey installation on your server using your domain name:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add the following lines at the end of the file:

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

Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

service httpd restart

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 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 6 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official LimeSurvey website.

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