IMP is a webmail client developed by Horde. It is known for its flexibility, ease of use, and massive features. Let's learn how to install IMP on Arch Linux.
Prerequisites
- Arch Linux with root access
- Internet connectivity
- Apache web server with PHP installed and configured
- MySQL or MariaDB installed and configured
Steps
- First, we need to ensure that our system is up-to-date. We can do this with the following command:
sudo pacman -Syu
- After the system update, we need to install the necessary dependencies to run IMP:
sudo pacman -S php php-apache mariadb
- Now, we need to configure our web server. For this tutorial, we will use Apache.
sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
- In the Apache configuration file, we need to enable PHP by adding the following lines in the "DirectoryIndex" directive:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
- Next, we need to enable MariaDB or MySQL in the systemctl tool:
sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo systemctl start mariadb
- After that, we need to create a database and a user. We can do this by logging into MariaDB or MySQL with the following command:
sudo mysql -u root -p
- Once we are in the MySQL/MariaDB prompt, we can create a database by running the following command:
CREATE DATABASE imp_db;
- After that, we need to create a user by running the following command:
CREATE USER 'imp_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
- Now we need to grant all privileges on the IMP database to the IMP user by running the following command:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON imp_db.* TO 'imp_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
- After we finished setting up our database, we need to download the latest version of IMP from Horde's website. We can do this with the following command:
sudo wget -O imp.tar.gz https://www.horde.org/download/package/imp/6.2.16/imp-6.2.16.tar.gz
- After the download is finished, we need to extract the files from the tarball with the following command:
sudo tar -xvzf imp.tar.gz
- After the extraction is finished, we need to copy the contents of the IMP directory to our web server directory. For example, we can copy it to /var/www/html/imp:
sudo cp -r imp-6.2.16 /var/www/html/imp
- After we copied the files, we need to change the ownership of the IMP directory to the Apache user:
sudo chown -R http:http /var/www/html/imp
- Now we can navigate to http://localhost/imp in our web browser to finish the installation process.
Conclusion
IMP is an exceptional webmail client with vast features. We learned how to install it on Arch Linux by using Apache as a web server, MariaDB/MySQL as a database management system, and PHP as a scripting language. With that, we can start using IMP as a webmail client in our environment.
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