Installing Roundcube webmail on Plesk 8

The Plesk 8 default webmail client is Horde, which would be fine if it was 2002. For me it was nothing but a headache (I never did get rid of all the PHP warnings), and worse, it seemed to consistently mangle sent emails. Finally I had the last straw and moved to Roundcube, which I’ve been a fan of since it first came out. Slick Web 2.0 application, looks like a stripped-down Yahoo Mail.

There were a few things to be aware of when installing, though. Here’s what I did:

1. Download and unzip the tarball to /usr/share/roundcube, so it sits next to Horde (which is installed to /usr/share/psa-horde).
2. Edit the Plesk vhost config file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/zz010_psa_httpd.conf as follows (changes are in bold):
   
<VirtualHost \
IPADDRESS
>
# DocumentRoot /usr/share/psa-horde/
DocumentRoot /usr/share/roundcube/

   Alias /horde/ /usr/share/psa-horde/
   Alias /imp/ /usr/share/psa-horde/imp/
   ServerName webmail
   ServerAlias webmail.*
   UseCanonicalName Off
   # <Directory /usr/share/psa-horde>
   <Directory /usr/share/roundcube>
   <IfModule sapi_apache2.c>
   php_admin_flag engine on
   php_admin_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
   php_admin_flag safe_mode off
   #php_admin_value open_basedir “/usr/share/psa-horde:/etc/psa-horde:/etc/psa:/tmp:/var/tmp:/var/log/psa-horde:/usr/share/doc:/usr/share/psa-pear”
   #php_admin_value include_path “/usr/share/psa-horde:/usr/share/psa-pear:.”
   </IfModule>
   <IfModule mod_php5.c>
   php_admin_flag engine on
   php_admin_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
   php_admin_flag safe_mode off
   #php_admin_value open_basedir “/usr/share/psa-horde:/etc/psa-horde:/etc/psa:/tmp:/var/tmp:/var/log/psa-horde:/usr/share/doc:/usr/share/psa-pear”
   #php_admin_value include_path “/usr/share/psa-horde:/usr/share/psa-horde/lib:/usr/share/psa-pear:.”
   </IfModule>
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>

3. Create the database and database user on the appropriate server and fill in the connection info.
4. Change the owner of /usr/share/roundcube to apache.
5. Bounce apache.
6. Then go to http://webmail.yourdomain.com/installer and follow the rest of the Roundcube install instructions.
7. Be sure to set $rcmail_config[‘default_host’] = “mail.yourdomain.com”.

Installing it this way makes for the most minimal changes, so if for some reason you wanted to revert to Horde, you’d just have to revert the vhost config file above and bounce apache again.