How to install Roundcube on your website at /mail directory

Roundcube is one of the most popular free web based email clients on the Internet. cPanel comes with Roundcube installed by default, however you can also install roundcube on your website using a custom directory to avoid using cPanel default installation.

Roundcube is the webmail client that saved us from being attached forever to the classic and old style webmail solutions like Squirrelmail and Horde, which are useful, but boring and have no style and usability at all.

On this post we will show you how to install Rouncube on your website, so you can load your mails from yoursite.com/mail or yoursite.com/email, and avoid the classic webmail login at www.yoursite.com/webmail or worse when you are redirected to https://server.hostname.com:2096/.

Install Roundcube on your website step by step

First, let’s create a MySQL database that will be used for the roundcube installation.

Move to cPanel – MySQL Databases: then create a MySQL database, user, password, and assign full privileges.

Open your ssh terminal, login as root into your server and move to the cPanel account where you want to install Roundcube.

cd /home/yoursite/public_html

Download and extract Roundcube

wget https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/releases/download/1.2.3/roundcubemail-1.2.3-complete.tar.gz
tar -xzvf roundcubemail-1.2.3-complete.tar.gz
mv roundcube mail

Replace “/home/yoursite/public_html” with the path of your website. Also, replace “mv roundcube mail” to the real destination of your directory, in this case we wanted to access Roundcube by using www.yoursite.com/mail, but you can also change that to access using anything else, like ’email’, ‘mailbox’, or whatever you want.

Access your Roundcube installation wizard from: http://www.yourdomain.com/mail, you will see three sections.

On the first screen there is a system check to see if Roundcube can be installed on your system or not. Green and orange colors are normal, while red marks indicate critical errors that must be fixed before proceeding.

Screenshot of Roundcube Installation - Check enviroment - Step 01.
Screenshot of Roundcube Installation – Check enviroment – Step 01.

The second part is the ‘Create config’ section, where you will have to introduce your MYSQL database data (db, user and password) that you created previously.

Roundcube Database Setup - Step 02
Roundcube Database Setup – Step 02

Once done, you can move to the final part and check that everything is ok. This is a Test section that will help you to test your roundcube installation before going live.  You can check and Test SMTP Configuration to send mails, as well as Test IMAP configuration, as you see below:

Last thing to do after you install Roundcube on your website - Test Configuration - Step 03
Last thing to do after you install Roundcube on your website – Test Configuration – Step 03

Last thing, delete / remove your ‘installer’ directory, located at the root of your /mail dir.

That’s all. Now you know how to install roundcube on your website, and this will help you to avoid using cPanel webmail, instead you can used your own /mail or /email directory, as you like.

About the Author: Martin Keler

4 Comments

    1. Hey Frank,

      You can try to replace the Roundcube original logo with a custom image. Search for roundcube_logo.png inside your roundcube installation directory, and just replace it with your own logo. Let me know if it works.

      Good luck.

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