LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor) is an open source online survey application. It allows you to develop and publish online surveys as well as to collect survey responses from participants without much effort. Today we are going to show you how to install this online survey application on a Linux VPS.
The current version of LimeSurvey offers a huge set of features. The full list of features can be found on the official LimeSurvey website.
Before we start, make sure that you have PHP 5.3 or a later release installed on your server with mbstring and pdo_mysql or pdo_mysqli enabled. Also, make sure that you have MySQL 4.1.0 or later installed on your server.
First of all, log in to your CentOS VPS via SSH and update all your system software to the latest version using the command:
yum update
Once the update finishes, you can download and extract the latest version of LimeSurvey on your server.
cd /opt && wget http://download.limesurvey.org/latest-stable-release/limesurvey206plus-build150619.tar.gz && tar -xzvf limesurvey206plus-build150619.tar.gz
At the moment of writing this tutorial, the latest stable version is 2.06. Make sure that you download the latest stable version. The download should take approximately 1-2 minutes depending on your Internet speed.
Next, move the extracted files to the /var/www/html/ directory and change the ownership of the files using the following command:
mv limesurvey /var/www/html/ && cd /var/www/html/ && chown -R apache: limesurvey/
LimeSurvey stores its data into a MySQL database so it is time to create a database, a database user and to set up a password. Log in to your MySQL server:
mysql -u root -p
Once you log in, run the following commands one by one:
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
It is time to 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>
Please replace yourdomain.com with the domain name you like to use for LimeSurvey and make sure that its A record is pointed to your server IP address. Save the file and close it. Restart Apache using the following command:
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
Open your favorite web browser and navigate to your domain name. You should be welcomed by the LimeSurvey online installation screen. Here, you need to follow the instructions to set up LimeSurvey.
Once you finish the installation you can access the admin section at:
http://yourdomain.com/admin
A good way to start using LimeSurvey is to read the user manual available on the official LimeSurvey website.
Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install LimeSurvey for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.
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