BitNami LimeSurvey

How to start/stop the servers?

The Stacks include a graphical tool to manage the servers easily. You can find the "manager-windows.exe", "manager-osx" or "manager-linux" tool in your installation directory. Using this tool, you can Start, Stop or Restart the servers and check the log files. You can click on the icon to start it.

On Windows: You can also start the Manager tool from shortcuts: Start -> Program Files -> BitNami Stack -> Manager tool

If you prefer, you can use the "ctlscript.sh" utility from the command line. This script is in the installation directory.

On OS X: You can start the Manager tool from the installation directory or you can use the "ctlscript.sh" utility from a Terminal.

host:~ user$ cd /Applications/application-version
host:~ user$ ./ctlscript.sh start

On Linux:

$ cd ~/applicaton-version
$ ./ctlscript.sh start

How to change the default URL?

1) An easy approach to have your application in the root URL is to uncomment the following lines in your application configuration file /installdir/apps/limesurvey/conf/limesurvey.conf. This approach only changes the initial page of your application, not the internal urls, all the links point to "http://yourdomain/limesurvey". If you do not see these lines you can add them at the end of the file. Note that "limesurvey" could be wordpress, joomla, drupal, etc.

# Uncomment the following lines to see your application in the root
# of your URL. This is not compatible with more than one application.
RewriteEngine On                                                                                  
RewriteRule ^/$ /limesurvey/ [PT]

Using this configuration and restarting the Apache server you can see your initial page of your application in the root URL.

2) Another option is to configure your application to run in the root URL directly. The details are described below (if you have already configured the application using the first method, note that you have to revert the change before continuing with this approach).

DocumentRoot "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"
# Alias /limesurvey/ "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs/"
# Alias /limesurvey "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"

(..)

$ sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apps/limesurvey/conf/limesurvey.conf

DocumentRoot "/opt/bitnami/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"
# Alias /limesurvey/ "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs/"
# Alias /limesurvey "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"

(...)

$ sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apps/limesurvey/conf/limesurvey.conf

DocumentRoot "/opt/bitnami/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"
# Alias /limesurvey/ "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs/"
# Alias /limesurvey "/installdir/apps/limesurvey/htdocs"

(...)

How to create a full backup of LimeSurvey?

Because BitNami stacks are self-contained, the simplest option for performing your backups is to copy or compress the BitNami Stack installation directory. To do so in a safe manner, you will need to stop all servers, so this method may not be appropriate if you have people accessing the application continously.

On Linux and OS X:

$ cd installdir
$ ./ctlscript.sh stop
$ cp -r installdir application-backup

Or you can create a tarball:

$ tar -czvf application-backup.tar.gz installdir

Or a zip file:

$ zip -r application-backup.zip installdir/*

To restore this backup you only need to uncompress the backup in the same location. It is important to use the same path that was used when the stack was originally installed.

For example if you have a backup in a Red Hat machine, you can copy it to an Ubuntu Linux machine (a different distro!) in the same location. Then start the servers and that’s all.

$ cd installdir
$ ./ctlscript.sh start

You just need to be carefull to keep the same permissions for the files and folders. If you installed as root make sure that in the new machine you copy the files also as root. And this case, if you are also moving MySQL or PostgreSQL, you will need to create those users in the new machine (if they don't exist yet).

On Windows:

On Windows, you should follow the same process. Stop the servers using the shortcuts and copy the whole installation directory. To restore the system, copy the directory to a different Windows machine in the same location and follow these steps from a command prompt:

$ cd installdir
$ serviceinstall.bat INSTALL

You can access your BitNami Application at the usual URL.

If you want to create only a database backup, check the following link for MySQL /Components/MySQL#How_to_create_a_database_backup or for PostgreSQL

How to upgrade LimeSurvey?

It is strongly recommended that you create a backup before starting the update process. If you have important data, it is advisable that you create and try to restore a backup to ensure that everything works properly.

There are two different ways to upgrade your application.

1. If you want to upgrade the application and all Stack components PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Apache… You can follow the steps described at How to upgrade the full Stack migrating the data?
2. In case you only want to upgrade the application code without modifying any other Stack components,  you should follow the guide which is in the application page itself.

How to enable SSL?

You can see how to configure Apache to enable SSL connections at How to enable SSL to access through https?

How to debug LimeSurvey errors?

Once Apache starts, it will create two log files, the access_log and the error_log /installdir/apache2/logs directory. You can change these files to see the exact error in the application.

The main MySQL log file is created at /installdir/mysql/data/mysqld.log file.

How to increase the allowed size of the uploaded files?

You can modify the following option in the php.ini file to increase the allowed size for uploads:

; Maximum size of POST data that PHP will accept.
post_max_size = 16M

...

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 16M