How to Install Mailu on Fedora CoreOS Latest

Mailu is a free, secured and fully-featured mail server software. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through installing Mailu on Fedora CoreOS.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed to the installation, let's ensure we have the following:

  • A Fedora CoreOS Latest machine
  • A command-line terminal

Step 1: Update the System

It's recommended to update your system's packages and dependencies before installing Mailu. To do this, open your terminal and run:

sudo dnf update

Enter your password when prompted and wait for the command to successfully finish.

Step 2: Install Docker and Docker-Compose

Mailu runs on Docker containers. Therefore, we'll need to install Docker and Docker-compose on our system. To install Docker on Fedora CoreOS, run the following commands:

sudo dnf install -y podman
sudo systemctl enable podman.service
sudo systemctl start podman.service
sudo dnf install -y docker-compose

Once installed, test to make sure docker and docker-compose are correctly installed by running:

docker --version
docker-compose --version

Step 3: Clone the Mailu Repository

With Docker and Docker-compose installed, the next step is to clone the Mailu repository. 

git clone https://github.com/Mailu/Mailu.git

Navigate to the cloned directory using:

cd Mailu/

Step 4: Customize the Configuration

We will need to update some values on the mailu.env configuration file before proceeding. Run:

cp mailu.env.sample mailu.env
nano mailu.env

Nano is a text editor that comes with Fedora CoreOS. If you don't have nano installed, you can use another text editor like Vim.

Locate the lines below and update the values accordingly:

MAILU_HOSTNAME=mail.example.com
PW_SECRET=CHANGE_ME

Change the MAILU_HOSTNAME value to your domain's name, and set a secure value for PW_SECRET.

Save and exit the mailu.env file.

Step 5: Start Mailu

To start Mailu, run the following command from the Mailu directory:

sudo docker-compose up -d

The command will start the Mailu service in detached mode (in the background). It may take a few minutes to download and configure all the necessary images.

Step 6: Verify Mailu is Running

Once you have the services running, you can check the status of the Mailu services with:

sudo docker-compose ps -a

You should see a list of services runnings. Look for five services with 'mailu' as a prefix:

  • mailu-admin
  • mailu-freshclam
  • mailu-front
  • mailu-redis
  • mailu-smtp

You can access the web interface to create new users and domains by visiting http://your-domain.com/admin. Don't forget to replace your-domain.com with the MAILU_HOSTNAME you set in the previous step.

Conclusion

We've successfully walked through the process of installing Mailu on Fedora CoreOS. You now have a secured email server running on your machine. You can visit the Mailu Documentation to learn more about the various Mailu settings and configurations.