How to Install Mailu on Manjaro

Mailu is a simple yet powerful mail server with a clean and modern interface. It provides a complete solution for both individuals and large organizations to handle their email needs. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install Mailu on Manjaro, a popular Arch-based Linux distribution.

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure that you have the following prerequisites:

  • A server or a VPS running Manjaro
  • A domain name pointing to your server
  • Root or sudo access to the server

Step 1: Install Docker and Docker-Compose

Mailu is built using Docker, so you’ll need to have Docker and Docker-Compose installed on your server. Here’s how to install them on Manjaro:

$ sudo pacman -Syu
$ sudo pacman -S docker docker-compose

Once installed, enable and start the Docker service:

$ sudo systemctl enable docker.service
$ sudo systemctl start docker.service

You can verify that Docker is running by typing:

$ sudo docker info

Step 2: Clone the Mailu Repository

Next, you need to clone the Mailu repository from GitHub:

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

This command will download the Mailu source code into a new directory called Mailu.

Step 3: Configure Mailu

Mailu needs to be configured before running it for the first time. You’ll need to go through the configuration files and modify them to suit your needs.

$ cd Mailu
$ cp mailu.env.sample mailu.env
$ cp data/.env.sample data/.env

Now, open the mailu.env file with your favorite text editor and modify the following variables:

  • MAILU_HOSTNAME: Set this to your domain name.
  • POSTMASTER_ADDRESS: Set the default postmaster address.
  • MLMMJADMIN_PASS, ROUND_PASS, RAINLOOP_PASS, SYMPA_PASS: Set the passwords for the respective services.

You can also set other variables like MAILU_DOMAINS, MAILU_ADMIN, and DSN_EMAIL to customize your Mailu installation.

Next, open the data/.env file and set the MAILU_ADMIN variable to your email address. This is the email address that will be used to manage Mailu.

Step 4: Generate SSL Certificates

Mailu requires SSL certificates to be installed to secure the email traffic. You can generate these certificates using Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate authority.

To generate the certificates, run the following command:

$ sudo docker-compose -f docker-compose-letsencrypt.yml run --rm letsencrypt

This will start the letsencrypt service, which will generate the SSL certificates and save them to the data/letsencrypt directory.

Step 5: Start Mailu

After configuration, you can start the Mailu services using the following command:

$ sudo docker-compose up -d

This command will start all the Mailu services in detached mode. You can view the logs of the services using:

$ sudo docker-compose logs -ft

After a few minutes, your Mailu server will be up and running. You can access it by visiting https://yourdomain.com (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name).

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install Mailu on Manjaro, a popular Arch-based Linux distribution. With Mailu, you now have a powerful email server that can handle all your email needs with ease.