LimeSurvey on IIS

by Eric Woersching

Introduction

LimeSurvey is a fully functional online survey development and data entry system including data entry screen, public data entry script, conditional questions, method for issuing unqiue invitation links (tokens), emailing invitations and recording responses, and basic statistical analysis.

For more information about LimeSurvey, see https://www.limesurvey.org/.

In this section, we go through the steps required to install LimeSurvey to work with FastCGI extension on IIS 7.0 and above. To find out more about FastCGI support in IIS, see https://www.iis.net/fastcgi.

The following steps assume that you have completed the setup and configuration of FastCGI extension and PHP libraries as described in this article.

Download and Unpack LimeSurvey

First, download the latest stable release of the LimeSurvey application. For this article, we use LimeSurvey 2.5x downloaded from https://www.limesurvey.org/#download

Once you download the package, uncompress it and copy all the files and folders to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\limesurvey.

Set Up the Database

Before starting the installation procedure for LimeSurvey, create a database on your server. Also create a user and grant this user db ownership permission to the database. Follow the instructions in the Setting Up a Database for a PHP Application on IIS article for a MySQL database. This walkthrough uses the following database information:

  • Database Name: 'limesurvey'
  • Database User: 'limesurveyuser'
  • Account Password: 'limesurvey'

Set Up and Configure LimeSurvey

Install Required Libraries

LimeSurvey requires two libraries named mbstring and php_pdo_mysql. To enable both libraries, open the PHP.ini file located in the PHP installation folder and search for mbstring and php_pdo_mysql. The lines that contain these stringsare most likely commented out with a semicolon. Remove the semicolons, save and restart your Web server.
LDAP and GD are optional libraries for the LimeSurvey tool. We have not enabled these tools for our application.

Run the Installation Script

Go to http://localhost/limesurvey/admin. Now the LimeSurvey installation script starts.

Screenshot of the Lime Survey installation script. The Progress and Welcome text are shown.

Follow the administration step – when you come to the database configuration screen please enter the credentials you configure for your database.

Screenshot of the local host slash lime survey slash admin web page. The Lime Survey installation script starts. The language selection menu is shown.

Login to the LimeSurvey Administration

After completing the installation you will be forwarded to the administration login page at http://your.domain.com/limesurvey/admin.

You should get the followin login screen. If you did not change the administration username and password during installation the default credentials are “admin” and “password” and must be changed as soon as possible.

Screenshot of the Lime Survey Administration log in page. The Username, Password, and Language boxes are shown.

Screenshot of the Lime Survey administration interface page. Options to Create survey, List Surveys, Global Settings, Comfort Update, Label sets, and templates are shown.

How to Use LimeSurvey

Refer to the below link for admin setup and using LimeSurvey.

http://manual.limesurvey.org/

If you would like to check out/import some sample survey there are several surveys available in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\limesurvey\docs\samplesurveys

Refer to the following screen shots for the survey.

Screenshot of the Sample Lime Survey page. Two questions are shown. The first question asks What city do you live in? The second question asks How long have you lived in years?

Screenshot of the Sample Lime Survey page. The question Which do you like best about? is written on the page. Choices are given in a drop down menu.

Getting More Information

To discuss the FastCGI support in IIS, or file bug reports, use the FastCGI forums:

To get more information regarding running various PHP applications on IIS refer to: