Installation¶
For the lazy ones¶
If you are in a hurry, you will love the modoboa installer! It’s a set of Python scripts to install a fully functional email server on one machine (modoboa, postfix, dovecot, amavis and more).
To use it, just run the following commands in your terminal:
$ git clone https://github.com/modoboa/modoboa-installer
$ cd modoboa-installer
$ sudo ./run.py <mail server hostname>
Wait a few minutes and you’re done o/
If you have more time or if you are just curious, you can install Modoboa the old way by going to the next section.
Requirements¶
Get Modoboa¶
You can choose between two options:
- Use the Python package available on the PyPI
- Download the sources tarball
The easiest one is to install it from PyPI. Just run the following command and you’re done:
$ pip install modoboa
If you prefer to use the tarball, download the latest one and run the following procedure:
$ tar xzf modoboa-<version>.tar.gz
$ cd modoboa-<version>
$ python setup.py install
All dependencies will be installed regardless the way you chose. The only exception concerns the RRDtool binding because there isn’t any python package available, it is directly provided with the official tarball.
Fortunately, all major distributions include a ready-to-use package. On Debian/Ubuntu:
$ apt-get install libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev librrd-dev
$ apt-get install python-rrdtool
virtualenv users¶
When you deploy an application using virtualenv, you may have to compile some dependencies. For example, modoboa relies on lxml, which is a C python module. In order to install it, you will need to install the following requirements:
- python development files
- libxslt development files
- libxml2 development files
- libz development files
On a Debian like system, just run the following command:
$ apt-get install python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev zlib1g-dev
Database¶
Thanks to Django, Modoboa supports several databases. Depending on the one you will use, you must install the appropriate python package:
- mysqldb for MySQL
- psycopg2 for PostgreSQL
Then, create a user and a database that will be used by Modoboa. Make sure your database is using UTF8 as a default charset.
Deployment¶
modoboa-admin.py, a command line tool, lets you deploy a ready-to-use Modoboa site using only one instruction:
$ modoboa-admin.py deploy modoboa_example --collectstatic [--dburl default:database-url] [--extensions extensions]
Note
By default, the core application of Modoboa and some necessary plugins
(admin, relaydomains and limits) are installed. To install extensions,
use the --extensions
option which accepts a list of extension names
as argument (--extensions ext1 ext2 ...
).
If you want to install all extensions, just use the all
shortcut like this --extensions all
.
If you choose to install extensions one at a time, you will have to
add their names in settings.py to MODOBOA_APPS
. Also ensure that
you have the line from modoboa_amavis.settings import *
at the
end of this file.
The list of available plugins can be found on the index page. Instructions to install them are available on each plugin page.
Note
You can specify more than one database connection using the
--dburl
option. Multiple connections are differentiated by a
prefix. The primary connection must use the default:
prefix (as
shown in the example above). For the amavis extension extension, use the
amavis:
prefix. An example two connections: --dburl
default:<database url> amavis:<database url>
.
Your database url should meet the following syntax
scheme://[user:pass@][host:port]/dbname
OR
sqlite:////full/path/to/your/database/file.sqlite
.
Available schemes are:
- postgres
- postgresql
- postgis
- mysql
- mysql2
- sqlite
The command will ask you a few questions, answer them and you’re done. You can now go to the First use section.
In case you need a silent installation (e.g. if you’re using Salt-Stack, Ansible or whatever), it’s possible to supply the database credentials as commandline arguments.
You can see the complete option list by running the following command:
$ modoboa-admin.py help deploy
Note
If you plan to serve Modoboa using a URL prefix, you must change the
value of the LOGIN_URL
parameter to LOGIN_URL = '/<prefix>/accounts/login/'
.
First use¶
Your installation should now have a default super administrator:
- Username:
admin
- Password:
password
It is strongly recommended to change this password the first time you log into Modoboa.
To check if your installation works, just launch the embedded HTTP server:
$ python manage.py runserver
You should be able to access Modoboa at http://localhost:8000/.
For a fully working interface using the embedded HTTP server, you need
to set the DEBUG
parameter in settings.py to True
.
For a production environment, we recommend using a stable webserver
like Apache2 or Nginx. Don’t forget to set
DEBUG
back to False
.