How to Install RainLoop Webmail Client with Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 18.04.  RainLoop Webmail is a simple, modern and fast web-based email client. It provides an easy and hustle free way to easily access your mails on any mail provider be it your own email servers, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, name them. RainLoop Webmail client offers quite a number of features;

• Complete support of IMAP and SMTP protocols including SSL and STARTTLS.
• Sieve scripts (Filters and vacation message).
• Integration with Facebook, Google, Twitter and Dropbox.
• Managing folders list.
• Configurable multi-level caching system.
• Extending functionality with plugins installed through admin panel.
• Perfect rendering of complex HTML mails.
• Drag’n’drop for mails and attachments

You can check more features of RainLoop Webmail here.

You may also want to check our previous article on how to setup Thunderbird mail client on Ubuntu 18.04.

Pre-requisites

As a pre-requisite;

1. RainLoop requires LAMP/LEMP stack in order to operate efficiently. Generally, ensure that the following items are set before you can install and setup RainLoop Webmail.

# apt install php7.2-{curl,xml}

...
192.168.43.17  webmail.example.com

# mkdir /var/www/html/rainloop

Download RainLoop Webmail archive

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

Install RainLoop Application

To install RainLoop, extract the files from the archive and upload them to the RainLoop web root directory.

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

Configure proper permission for files and directories of the RainLoop

• Set the read/write permissions for all RainLoop application directories to 755 (drwxr-xr-x);

# find /var/www/html/rainloop/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

• Set the read/write permissions for all RainLoop application files to 644 (-rw-r--r--);

# find /var/www/html/rainloop/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

• Change the ownership of the RainLoop Web root directory to www-data.

# chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html/rainloop/

Configure a Server Block for RainLoop

After the installation, you need to create a server block configuration for RainLoop as shown below.

# vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop.conf

server {
	listen 80;

	server_name webmail.example.com;
	root /var/www/html/rainloop;

        access_log /var/log/rainloop/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/rainloop/error.log;

	index index.php;

	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;
	}
}

Create the RainLoop log directory as defined in the configuration file above.

# mkdir /var/log/rainloop

Once you are done with configuration, save the file and test for syntax errors;

# nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

# ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/rainloop.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

# systemctl reload nginx