This is a HowTo get Roundcube Webmail client up and running in ClearOS 6.3. Roundcube itself is just an e-mail client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird and can easily be configured to read your IMAP mail held anywhere in your network from the web.

For this set up I will assume you have installed the Web Server and MySQL. PHPMyAdmin could be useful if you want to avoid a couple of the steps at the command line.

My main sources of information are the Roundcube Wiki and the INSTALL file in the tarball.

Instructions:

Download the latest stable version from here. I have not found a direct link that you can use with wget. Upload it into a folder on your server with something like WinSCP.

In a terminal, navigate to the folder where you downloaded the tarball then:

yum --enablerepo=clearos-epel install php-mcrypt php-pear-DB php-pear-MDB2-Driver-mysql php-pear-Mail-mimeDecode php-pear-Net-IDNA2 

tar xfz roundcubemail-0.8.1.tar.gz

mv roundcubemail-0.8.1 /var/www/html/roundcube

chown apache:apache /var/www/html/roundcube -R

This untars the file and moves the contents into a folder called roundcube in the web server. You can call the folder what you want but amend the instructions accordingly and remember to change the url you use to access Roundcube. It then changes ownership of the files and folders to apache.

There is an irritating feature of Roundcube. It does not like you using the system setting of timezone and it prefers you to use the php setting. This is not set by default. If you do not set the timezone in php your logs will see 9 messages every minute (per logged in user?). This is a PITA. I have seen two similar ways round it.

1 - in /etc/php.ini look for a line ";date.timezone =". Uncomment it and add your timezone. Valid timeszone names can be found here.
2 - put a line date.timezone = your_timesone into /var/www/html/roundcube/.htaccess

From what I understand 1 changes the setting globally in the Webserver, 2 changes it for Roundcube only. I did 2.

Next you want to enable .htaccess overrides. In /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, change:

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.

# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:

#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit

#

    AllowOverride None

to

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.

# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:

#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit

#

    AllowOverride All

Then restart the webserver:

service httpd restart

Next you need to set up the database in MySQL. This can be done through the webconfig if you have PHPMyAdmin installed or through the command line. The command line instructions are:

mysql -uroot -pyour_mysql_password -e"CREATE DATABASE roundcubemail;"

mysql -uroot -pyour_mysql_password -e"GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON roundcubemail.* TO your_roundcube_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'roundcube_password';"

mysql -uroot -pyour_mysql_password roundcubemail < /var/www/html/roundcube/SQL/mysql.initial.sql

Change your_roundcube_user to whatever user ID you would like Roundcube to use. Change roundcube_password to whatever you want. You will need these later in the installation.

Alternatively you could use Webconfig > Database > MySQL Server > “Go to MySQL Management Tool” and do the MySQL set up from there.

Once you have done this, in a browser , navigate to http://your_server_ip/roundcube/installer" target="_blank">http://your_server_ip/roundcube/installer" target="_blank"> http://your_server_ip/roundcube/installer" target="_blank">http://your_server_ip/roundcube/installer
In 1 Environment Check:
Make sure all items except Intl:, PostgreSQL: and SQLite (v2): are green then hit "Next"
In 2 Create Config I left most things as default. Options changed were:
General configuration
- Disable spellchecker. The spell checker is contentious as it sends everything to Google (Googiespell). The choice is yours.
Logging & Debugging
- Log driver to “syslog”. Otherwise the logs go to /var/www/html/roundcube/logs/ and you will have to configure logrotate to rotate them or they will grow forever.
Database setup
Database user name = your_roundcube_user from earlier
Database password = roundcube_password from earlier
IMAP Settings
default_host = localhost (It does not have to be. It is the location of your imap server. If this is on a server behind ClearOS then point it to that)
SMTP Settings
smtp_server = localhost (You must use this if you use your smtp server as a relay. If not, you could leave it blank)
Display settings & user prefs
preview_pane = checked (because I like it!)
htmleditor = checked (ditto)

Change other prefs as you want then click on Create Config. Then follow the instructions in the green box. I think the best thing to do is to download the two files by clicking on the download links then upload them to /var/www/html/roundcube/config

These two files probably should have apache as the owner and the webserver needs restarting again:

chown apache:apache /var/www/html/roundcube –R

service httpd restart

Then Click on Continue in the installer. In 3 Test Config I get one error because I did configure the support_url. This is deliberate as it means anyone who bumps into your web site will get a link or e-mail address to where ever you chose. I prefer not to have this. You can now send a test e-mail and do a test log in.

Open your firewall to http and/or https. Roundcube can now be accessed from your browser on http://your_server_ip/roundcube/" target="_blank"> http://your_server_ip/roundcube/ or https://your_server_ip/roundcube/" target="_blank"> https://your_server_ip/roundcube/

Two further things. The docs say that if you add users you should “flush privileges” before they can log on. I don’t like this, but if you often add users, you can create a cron.daily job/file with the following line in it:

mysql -uroot -pyour_mysql_password -e'FLUSH PRIVILEGES;'

Also recommended in the docs is a routine database cleanup. Create a file in cron.monthly and in it put

/var/www/html/roundcube/bin/cleandb.sh

Remember to make both cron jobs executable.

Enjoy!

[edit]
I have now added instructions to install from an rpm here, further down the thread. The advantage of the rpm is that it keeps your files away from your webserver root; it uses a better set up for logging; it is possibly a bit simpler to do. The disadvantages are that the files are not all in one place and you lose the installer so have to configure two files by hand.
When I come to installing on my production box (rather than my test VM), I will probably use the rpm method and tweak it so I can use roundcube rather than roundcubemail in the URL.
[/edit]