Question Duplicate Roundcube installation / getting a second Roundcube to run

[isotophe]

Server operating system version

Rocky Linux 8.10

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.69 #1

Hello fellow Pleskians!

Long time user, first time poster

So, here's the deal:
We run a pretty heavily customized Roundcube install with an in-house built extended theme over an alternate theme (elastic2022).

Sales recently closed a deal to get our first reseller on board. Even though we've been hosting for well over 15 years, this is the first time a reseller opportunity came by.

The first reseller hurdle was easy enough to overcome: the Plesk branding. Even though the reseller could upload his logo and set a custom Plesk title on his branding page, the Plesk Login page still had our custom background and our company logo.

I just reset it to the default Plesk identity for the server admin and made our own company a reseller, too. So when we log on, our branding comes up. That's good enough.

But about Roundcube... I just don't know what to do.

At first I tried spinning up a webhosting account for web.ourmailproduct.our.name and adding that to /admin/webmail/create, but it didn't really work properly when set up under webmail.costumer.domain.
The idea was for our custom Roundcube to live at that address, and for the default Plesk Roundcube to be restored to its default styling, without our branding, so our Reseller could use it. And then I would point our own costumers to the custom Roundcube using Service Plan > Email > Webmail.

As that didn't work, I had another idea: Horde isn't getting any more updates and we didn't use it... so I tried coaxing our Roundcube to live at /usr/share/psa-horde.
Roundcube doesn't run on PHP 7, so I tried using the steps described in How to change PHP version for webmail in Plesk for Linux? but swapping our roundcube.php for horde.php (with roundcube info inside it), but that also didn't work. An info.php inside psa-horde always comes up as running on PHP 7.4, no matter how much I abuse my Plesk install.
I also tried creating a new PSAdb > Webmails via PMA setting the productid as "ourmail", then duplicating and modifying the paths of every roundcube-related file I could find by GREPping the Plesk directories, but that also didn't work.

Am I going in a completely wrong way about this? Can I even get a double-roundcube install like this?

Best regards,
Henry

 

[Kaspar]

Hello fellow Pleskians!

Long time user, first time poster

Hi Henry, welcome to the forum!

But about Roundcube... I just don't know what to do.

What is your exact objective with Roundcube? Because if your objective is to just have a different branding for your reseller, running a separate Roundcube installation might be a bit overkill. Instead it might be easier to just modify the Roundcube configuration to show a different logo for your reseller (or for each customer).

There is a how-to posted by another forum user which might help you accomplish what you're after:

Instruction - How to brand Roundcube on a per-domain basis

I'd like to share a quick and dirty hack that I used to brand my customers' Roundcube interface (now that it is running on v1.4) with their own logos. It was a fun little project and they absolutely loved it. With this, the customer will see...

talk.plesk.com

 

[isotophe]

Hi Henry, welcome to the forum!


What is your exact objective with Roundcube? Because if your objective is to just have a different branding for your reseller, running a separate Roundcube installation might be a bit overkill. Instead it might be easier to just modify the Roundcube configuration to show a different logo for your reseller (or for each customer).

There is a how-to posted by another forum user which might help you accomplish what you're after:

Instruction - How to brand Roundcube on a per-domain basis

I'd like to share a quick and dirty hack that I used to brand my customers' Roundcube interface (now that it is running on v1.4) with their own logos. It was a fun little project and they absolutely loved it. With this, the customer will see...

talk.plesk.com

Hey there Kaspar!

While that's a pretty cool hack (that I really didn't know of) and I could use it to change the active skin based on the URL... it's a bit clunky to manually put stuff into a directory to enable it. Even if I just want it to show the default skin with the RC branding.

I'd rather have another active webmail 'profile' what I could set to my Service Plans (just like we have Horde and RC), then all of my costumers old and new would have it applied by Plesk itself, automatically. We'd run a standard RC install and it would be the default for resellers, and our customized RC would be applied by our own Service Plans (that's what I tried coaxing the Horde profile/directories into).

 

[Kaspar]

Gotcha, I have no experience setting up an alternative Roundcube installation next to the official Roundcube install, so I am not sure if I am of much help here. However I suspect the only way to achieve what you're after is to create your own Plesk Extension to run a custom Roundcube install (or any other webmail client for that matter). You probably have a fair bit of work a head of you going down this route, but it seems doable.

At minimum a Plesk Extension is needed to have your alternative Roundcube installation available as an webmail option in a Service Plan. You can of course code your Plesk Extension to do a lot more (install Roundcube, configure the needed system user and created the needed Nginx and Apache configuration). But I suspect it's faster to do those things manually, as it's (probably) a one time action any way.

For example you can manually install Roundcube in a separate directory (like /usr/share/custom-roundcube) and create the required system user and user group. The required server configuration (Nginx and Apache) can probably be added using custom templates, but can be managed through the Extension too (it seems).

Again, I've never done this myself. Take this post with a grain of salt. This is just my suggestion based of the Plesk documentation and my own knowledge.