If you don’t know what limesurvey is?
- Limesurvey is a great opensource survey application. It has been widely used by many big industries to create the survey tasks. It has many powerful features like creating dynamic fields for survey. Supports multilingual, defines userroles, user groups and the more it has been integrated into various CMS (drupal etc). The limesurvey team provides the commercial for those who are seeking.As well as community support for its users. Just to get the more details inside the limesurvey visit the http://www.limesurvey.org/

So, Here is basic guide on installing limesurvey.

At first download the limesurvey from http://www.limesurvey.org/en/download
Then click in the button where it says “Click here to download the latest version” (see the screenshot below)

When you click the link you get to a new page. From the new page click the file “limesurvey192-build120303.zip” or whichever link you think is suitable for you. I assume you know what these different files mean.

When the download is complete, extract the compressed file. You will get a new folder limesurvey. Copy this folder to the root of your document root or simply saying ‘htdocs’.

Now, here is the main configuration part for limesurvey.
- Open the limesurvey/config.php

and replace the following lines with appropriate settings

$databaselocation   =   'localhost';
$databasename       =   'limesurvey';
$databaseuser       =   'root';
$databasepass       =   '';
$dbprefix           =   'lime_';

$rooturl            =   "http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}/ls";

// Installation Setup
$defaultuser        =   'admin';           // This is the username when LimeSurvey is installed and the administration user is created on installation
$defaultpass        =   'password';

In the above url, if your limesurvey folder is different than “limesurvey” as in my case it is “ls” then you also have to reflect that changes in $rooturl variable. To do that simply replace the name folder at the end of the $rooturl variable with newer one. see the line 7 in above code.

Then There is the installation setup which is admin username and password that will be used to login into the limesurvey admin page.

Now, Create a database named “limesurvey” or whichever you put into the config.php settings.

We are done with the settings. Now, we will have to populate the database with intial settings for limesurvey to operate. To do that visit the link

http://localhost/limesurvey/admin/install/

You’ll get a message as “A database named ‘limesurvey’ already exists. Do you want to populate that database now by creating the necessary tables.”.

It is fine we did that on purpose,right. This database is empty and now we will populate with necessary limesurvey tables.

see the screenshot below

To do that, Just click in the “populate database”. This will take a moment.

When everything goes fine you will get a message as “Database `limesurvey` has been successfully populated.” as shown in screenshot below :

Now if you click on the button “Main admin screen” you will get a error message stating that either you should delete or rename the install folder.

Rename install folder
Delete or rename the install folder. In Development environment, I usually rename the install folder.

• -goto the limesurvey/admin folder
• rename the “install” folder to the “old.install”

Now, we are done with limesurvey installation and it is ready for creating surveys.

To start the limesurvey administration visit the url http://localhost/limesurvey/admin/

Login to the limesurvey
To login to the limesurvey, use the username/password configured inside “config.php”.

I have tried to be as smooth as possible with the installation and forgive my English, i know its quite up and down. So that was all and if you are looking for more limesurvey tutorials drop some comments and I will try to be helpful as much as possible.

References :
1. Limesurvey Homepage, http://www.limesurvey.org/
2. Limesurvey Developer’s Wiki, http://docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=LimeSurvey%20Development&redirectpage=Development