In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to quickly install the RainLoop email client on your Ubuntu 20.04 VPS, including instructions for both Apache and Nginx setup.
RainLoop Webmail is a simple, modern, and fast web-based email client. Written in PHP, RainLoop provides an easy way to check your emails using your web browser. It comes with full support of both IMAP and SMTP protocols (SSL, STARTTLS), sieve scripts support, integration with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Dropbox, a multi-level caching system, plugin support, keyboard shortcut support, and many other additional features.
The installation is very simple. If you follow our instructions carefully, you can finish the RainLoop Webmail installation in less than 10 minutes. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Requirements:
- For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS.
- You will also need a working LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack.
- Full SSH root access or a user with sudo privileges is also required.
Step 1: Connect to Your Server
Before we begin with the installation, you will need to connect to your server via SSH as the root user or as any other user that has sudo privileges.
To connect to your server as the root user, use the following command:
ssh root@IP_ADDRESS -p PORT_NUMBER
Make sure to replace IP_ADDRESS and PORT_NUMBER with your actual server IP address and SSH port number.
Once logged in, make sure that your server is up-to-date by running the following commands:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
You could even restart your VPS just to ensure that all packages that are being used are the ones that we just updated.
Step 2: Install RainLoop Webmail
There are two RainLoop Webmail editions available for download: Community Edition (under the AGPL v3 license) and Standard Edition (under the RainLoop software license).
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will install the free and open-source community edition.
To download the latest RainLoop Webmail community version, run the following command:
wget http://www.rainloop.net/repository/webmail/rainloop-community-latest.zip
Next, let’s create a new directory for our RainLoop webmail installation. In our example, we will use /var/www/rainloop, but you can also choose a different location.
To create the rainloop directory, run the following command:
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
Step 3: Set Permissions
Once the installation is completed, you will need to set the correct file and directory permissions.
To set the proper read/write permissions, run the following commands:
cd /var/www/rainloop
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
The owner of the files needs to be the user of the web server running on your system. In our example, we are using the Apache web server and Apache runs under the “www-data” user on Ubuntu. To change the owner of the files, you can then run the following commands:
cd /var/www/rainloop chown -R www-data:www-data .
The same user should also apply in case you’re using Nginx.
Step 3: Configure Apache/Nginx
In this step, we will show you how to create a virtual host file in Apache or Nginx – the procedure depends on which web server you have running on your system. This is so that you can access your RainLoop installation from your browser.
Configuring Apache
Create the virtual host file by executing the following command:
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/rainloop.conf
Then enter the following information:
<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>
In our example, we decided to use a subdomain called webmail.mydomain.com for accessing our RainLoop. Make sure to replace mydomain.com with your actual domain name.
To enable the new RainLoop virtual host, run the following command:
a2ensite rainloop.conf
You should see the following output:
Enabling site rainloop. To activate the new configuration, you need to run: systemctl reload apache2
Reload your Apache in order to activate the new configuration:
systemctl reload apache2
That’s it – your Apache configuration is complete.
Configuring Nginx
Create the virtual host file by executing the following command:
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop.conf
Insert the following contents in that file:
server {
listen 80;
server_name webmail.mydomain.com;
root /var/www/rainloop;
index index.php;
access_log /var/log/nginx/rainloop_access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/rainloop_error.log;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
fastcgi_keep_conn on;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
location ^~ /data {
deny all;
}
}
In our example, we decided to use a subdomain called webmail.mydomain.com for accessing our RainLoop instance. Make sure to replace mydomain.com with your actual domain name.
To enable the server configuration that we just created, run the following command:
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rainloop.conf
To check for any Nginx configuration errors, run the following command:
nginx -t
If there are no errors, you should get the following output:
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
You can now reload Nginx in order to activate the new configuration:
systemctl reload nginx
Step 4: Accessing RainLoop Webmail
To access your RainLoop Webmail admin panel, open your browser and enter http://webmail.mydomain.com/?admin (replace this with the actual domain name you used in your web server configuration).
The default admin login credentials are:
Username: admin Password: 12345
You will be taken to the RainLoop admin panel, from which you can manage your RainLoop setup and configure your email server settings. It is also highly recommended to change your admin password as soon as you log in.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed RainLoop Webmail on your Ubuntu 20.04 VPS.
Keeping track of your email server and maintaining it is vital to most businesses. A client is useless without a reliable email server. With our managed Ubuntu hosting, we can manage and maintain all aspects of your email chain with ease. This saves you the trouble of debugging any current and future issues, and it frees up your time to be more productive. This full support is included with our VPSes and never expires.
If this tutorial helped you set up RainLoop on your Ubuntu VPS, we’d greatly appreciate you telling us your install experience in a comment down below. You can also share this post online by using our share shortcuts to help spread the word.
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