Optional settings

Note

These optional settings can only be found in config-defaults.php of a standard installation - some of them are only used for first installation and overriden in Global settings. If you want to change these settings please do not change it in config-defaults.php but copy the particular setting/line over to config.php and change it there. All settings in config.php overwrite the default values from config-defaults.php and starting with version 1.87 some of these settings get overridden in the Global settings dialog. This way it is much easier to upgrade your installation at a later time!

Database-Specific

• $databaseport: Set this to the port used by your database server. In most cases "default" is fine - if your DB server is using a non-standard port just change 'default' to the port number.
• $databasetabletype: MySQL storage engine that should be used when creating survey results tables and token tables (if mysql is used). 'MyISAM' is the recommended default value and the only engine guaranteed to work.
• $databasepersistent: If you want to enable persistent database connections set this to 'true' - this might be faster for some database drivers. Default is false.

General settings

• $sitename: Give your survey site a name. This name will appear in the survey list overview and in the administration header. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $siteadminemail: This is the default email address of the site administrator and used for system messages and contact options. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $siteadminbounce: This is the email address where bounced emails will be sent to. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $siteadminname: The real name of the site administrator. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)

Security

• $surveyPreview_require_Auth: true by default. If you set this to false any person can test your survey using the survey URL - without logging in to the administration and without having to activate the survey first. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• usercontrolSameGroupPolicy :  set to true by default. By default non admin users defined in the LimeSurvey management interface will only be able to see other users if they belong to at least one group this user belongs to. This is set by the following parameter:
• $filterxsshtml: This setting enables filtering of suspicious html tags in survey, group, questions and answer texts in the administration interface. Only leave this to 'false' if you absolutely trust the users you created for the administration of  LimeSurvey and if you want to allow these users to be able to use Javascript, Flash Movies, etc. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $demoModeOnly: If this option is set to true, then LimeSurvey will go into demo mode. The demo mode changes the following things:
  • Disables changing of the admin user's details and password
  • Disables uploading files on the template editor
  • Disables sending email invitations and reminders
  • Disables doing a database dump
  • Disables the ability to save the following global settings: Site name, Default language, Default Htmleditor Mode, XSS filter

Resources

• $memorylimit: This sets how much memory LimeSurvey can access. '16M' is the minimum (M=mb) recommended. If you receive time out errors or have problems generating statistics or exporting files raise this limit to '128M' or '256M'.
• $sessionlifetime: Defines the time in seconds after which a survey session expires. Default: $sessionlifetime    =  3600; (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)

Appearance

• $lwcdropdowns: This can be set to either "L" or "R". Setting it to "R" will result in 'List with Comment' questions being displayed as radio buttons, whereas "L" will result in 'List with Comment' questions being displayed in a 'dropdown' list box. (Obsolete in 2.0)
• $dropdownthreshold: When you have selected "R" for $dropdowns, this allows you to set a maximum number of options that will display as radio buttons, before converting back to a dropdown list. If you have a question that has a large number of options, displaying them all as radio buttons can look unweildy, and be counter-intuitive to users. Setting this to a maximum of, say 25 (which is the default) means that large lists are easier for the survey participant to use.
• $repeatheadings: With the array (flexible) type question, often you'll have a lot of answers, which - when displayed on screen - take up more than one page. The repeat-headers setting lets you decide how many answers should be displayed before repeating the header information for the question. A good setting for this is around 15. If you don't want the headings to repeat at all, set this to 0 (which is the default).
• $minrepeatheadings: The minimum number of reaming answers that are required before repeating the headings in array (flexible) questions.
• $addTitleToLinks: If this option is set to true, then LimeSurvey will add 'title' html element to all links used in menus. This will help screen reader to analyze the menus. Only set this to true if you're using a screen reader because it overlaps with tool tips.
• $defaulttemplate: This setting specifys the default theme used for the 'public list' of surveys. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $defaulthtmleditormode: Sets the default mode for integrated HTML editor (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog) . Valid settings are: inline (default), popup and none:
  • inline: Inline replacement of fields by an HTML editor. Slow but convenient and user friendly
  • popup: Adds an icon that runs a popup with and html editor. Faster, but html code is displayed on the form
  • none: No html editor

Language & Time

• $defaultlang: This should be set to the default language to be used in your administration scripts, and also the default setting for language in the public surveys. You can change this setting for public surveys on a survey-by-survey basis from the admin scripts. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $timeadjust: If your web server is in a different time zone to the location where your surveys will be based, put the difference between your server and your home time zone here. For example, I live in Australia but use a US web server. The web server is 14 hours behind my local time zone. So my setting here is "14". In other words, it adds 14 hours to the web servers time. This setting is particularly important when surveys timestamp the responses. (starting with 1.87 this setting is merely a default and can be changed in the Global settings dialog)
• $modrewrite: If set to 1, it activates the fancy URL feature (Example: http://survey.example.com/123456/lang-fr/tk-sdlfkjozeiru instead of http://survey.example.com/index.php?sid=123456⟨=fr&token;=sdlfkjozeiru). Before you activate this, you must rename "htaccess.txt" file to ".htaccess". You need to run an Apache web server with correctly installed mod_rewrite module.

Survey Behavior

• $allowmandbackwards: A setting of 1 for this variable will allow survey participants to move to a previous question even if they haven't answered a mandatory question. If it is set on 0, then participants will have to answer that question even to move to a previous question.
• $deletenonvalues: (Note: $deletenonvalues is no longer used in LimeSurvey 1.92+.  Irrelevant values are always NULLed in the database, regardless of the setting of $deletenonvalues.) This is a fairly difficult setting to explain. If set to 0, if a question (let's call it question "b") is only displayed conditionally (ie: based on the answer to a previous question - let's call it question "a"), and a survey user answers that question (question "b"), but then moves backwards through the script and changes the previous question (question "a") such that this question (question "b") no longer displays, the survey will still remember and save their answer to the no longer applicable question (question "b"). I generally prefer this to be the case, on the basis that it may be interesting to know this information anyway. But, if you would prefer that the script be consistent and refuse to store information that shouldn't logically display you can change this setting to 1, and the script will not save this redundant information.
• $shownoanswer: When a question of a radio button/select type that contains editable answers (ie: List, Array questions) is not mandatory and $shownoanswer is set to 1, an additional entry is shown for "N/A" - so that participants may choose to not answer the question. Some people prefer this not to be available. Set this to 0 to turn this off. (starting with 1.87 this setting is overridden in the Global settings dialog)
• $printanswershonorsconditions: This setting determines if the printanswers feature will display entries from questions that were hidden by conditions-branching. (Default: 1 = hide answers from questions hidden by conditions)
• $hide_groupdescr_allinone: This setting is relevant for all-in-one surveys using conditions and has bene introduced in LimeSurvey 1.85RC3. When this is set to true the group name and description is hidden if all questions in the group are hidden. (Default: true (hide group name and description when all conditions in the group are hidden by conditions))
• $showpopups:  Show popup messages if mandatory or conditional questions have not been answered correctly. 1=Show popup message (default), 0=Show message on page instead.

Development

• $debug: With this setting you set the PHP error reporting to E_ALL. That means every little notice, warning or error with the script is shown. This setting should be only switched to 1 if you are trying to debug the application for any reason, if you are a developer switch it to 2. Don't switch it to 1 or 2 in production since it might cause path disclosure. (Default: 0)

Email Settings

Note: Starting with 1.87 the settings in this section are overridden in the Global settings dialog.

• $emailmethod:  This determines how E-mail messages are being sent. The following options are available:
  • mail: use internal PHP mailer
  • sendmail: use sendmail mailer
  • smtp:use SMTP relaying. Use this setting when you are running LimeSurvey on a host that is not your mail server.
• $emailsmtphost: If you use 'smtp' as $emailmethod then you have to put your SMTP-server here. If you are using Google mail you might have to add the port number like $emailsmtphost = 'smtp.gmail.com:465';
• $emailsmtpuser: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your user name, otherwise it must be blank.
• $emailsmtppassword: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your password, otherwise it must be blank.
• $emailsmtpssl: Set this to 'ssl' or 'tls' to use SSL/TLS for SMTP connection
• $maxemails: When sending invitations or reminders to survey participants, this setting is used to determine how many emails can be sent in one bunch. Different web servers have different email capacities, and if your script takes too long to send a bunch of emails, the script could time out and cause errors. Most web servers can send 100 emails at a time within the default 30 second time limit for a PHP script. If you get script timeout errors when sending large numbers of emails, reduce the number in this setting.  Clicking the 'send email invitation' button on the token control toolbar, (not the button on the right of each token), sends the maxemails number of invitations, then displays a list of the addresses sent to and a warning that "There are more emails pending than could be sent in one batch. Continue sending emails by clicking below. There are ### emails still to be sent." and provides a "continue button" to proceed with the next batch. I.e., the user determines when to send the next batch after each batch gets emailed.  It is not necessary to wait with this screen active.  The admin could log off and come back at a later time to send the next batch of invites.

Statistics and Response Browsing

• $usejpgraph: (< 1.8) The JPGraph-library lets you display the results of your survey in the statistics part of LimeSurvey  in bar- and pie charts. If you have a correctly configured jpgraph class set up on your server, you can turn this feature on or off (1=on, 0=off). Please have a look, every version of PHP needs another version of JPGraph! This feature is currently in development, so expect a few weird outcomes.
• $jpgraphdir: (< 1.8) The physical disk location of the jpgraph class scripts. This setting is only required if $usejpgraph is equal to 1.
• $jpgraphfont: (< 1.8) The font to use with graphs. A failsafe setting would be "FF_FONT1"
• $embedded: If you want to integrate LimeSurvey into another page then you can turn off sending HTML headers by using this setting and point instead to the header method of a custom function. This is a dirty hack but should work for a quick integration.
• $filterout_incomplete_answers: Control the default behaviour of  filtering incomplete answers when browsing or analyzing responses. For a discussion on incomplete Responses see Browsing survey results. Since these records can corrupt the statistics, an option is given to switch this filter on or off in several GUI forms. This parameter config.php is just the default state for the incomplete answer filter. The following options are available:
  • show: Show both complete and incomplete answers
  • filter: Show only complete answers
  • incomplete: Show only incomplete answers
• $stripQueryFromRefurl: This setting determine if the referrer URL saves parameter or not. Default value is "false" (in this case referrer URL saves all parameter). Alternatively this value can be set to "true" and the parameter part of the referrer URL will be removed.
• $showaggregateddata: (>=1.8) When activated there are additional values like arithmetic mean and standard deviation at statistics. Furthermore data is aggregated to get a faster overview e.g. results of scale 1+2 and 4+5 are added to have a general ranking like "good" (1/2), "average" (3) and "bad" (4/5). This only affects question types "A" (5 point array) and "5" (5 point choice).
• PDF Export Settings: (>1.85) This feature activates PDF export for printable survey and Print Answers. The PDF export is totally experimental. The output is mostly ugly. At this point no support can be given - if you want to help to fix it please get in touch with us.
  • $usepdfexport: Set 0 to disable; 1 to enable
  • $pdfdefaultfont: Default font for the pdf Export
  • $pdffontsize: Fontsize for normal text; Surveytitle is +4; grouptitle is +2
  • $notsupportlanguages = array('zh-Hant-TW','zh-Hant-HK','zh-Hans','ja','th');
  • $pdforientation: Set L for Landscape or P for portrait format
• $showsgqacode: (>1.91) This setting is used at the printable survey feature {IMG(attId="78",height="16",width="16")} and defaults to false. If you set $showsgqacode = true; the IDs for each question - and answer if applicable - will be shown; these IDs match the column heading at the Lime_survey_12345 table which holds the answer data for a certain survey. These Ids can be used for a code book for manual database queries.
• {IMG(attId="79",height="200",width="400")}

LDAP settings

As this is an extensive topic we have moved LDAP settings to another page.

Authentication

Delegate Authentication to the Webserver

System Administrators may want to have their survey administrators authenticated against a central authentication system (Active Directory, openLdap, Radius, ...) rather than using the internal LimeSurvey database. An easy way to do this is to setup your Webserver software to use this external authentication system, and then ask LimeSurvey to trust the user identity reported by the webserver. In order to enable this feature you have to:

• set $useWebserverAuth to true in config.php
• enable authentication at the webserver side

Please note that:

• LimeSurvey will then bypass its own authentication process (by using the login name reported by the webserver without asking for a password)
• this can only replace the LimeSurvey GUI authentication system, not the survey invitation system (participant interface)

Authentication Delegation with no automatic user import

Please note however than by default Authentication Delegation doesn't bypass the LimeSurvey authorization system: this means that, even if you don't have to manage passwords in LimeSurvey, you still need to define the users in the LimeSurvey database and assign them the correct set of rights in order to let them access survey resources.

A user is then granted access to LimeSurvey if and only if:

• he has been authenticated to the webserver
• his login name is defined as a user in the LimeSurvey user database (the user is then granted the privileges of the user defined in the LimeSurvey user database).

Authentication Delegation with automatic user import

When managing huge user database, it is sometimes easier to auto-import user in the LimeSurvey database.

• $WebserverAuth_autocreateUser: if set to true LimeSurvey will try to autoimport users authenticated by the webserver but not already in its users' DB
• $WebserverAuth_autouserprofile: an array describing the default profile that will be assigned to the user (including fake First and Last name, email, privileges)

If you want to customize the user profile so that it matches the logged-in user, you'll have to develop a simple function called hook_get_autouserprofile: with this function you can retrieve from a central User account database (for instance an LDAP directory), the true First&Last; names and email of a particular user. You can even customize his privileges on the system based on his groups on the external DB.

The hook_get_autouserprofile function takes the user login name as the only argument and can return:

• False or an empty array: in this case the user is denied access to LimeSurvey
• an array containing all common userprofile entries as described in the  $WebserverAuth_autouserprofile

function hook_get_autouserprofile($user_name)

{

     // Retrieve user's data from your database backend (for instance LDAP) here

     ... get $user_name_from_backend

     ... get $user_email_from_backend

     ... get $user_lang_from_backend

     ... from groups defined in your backend set $user_admin_status_frombackend_0_or_1

     return Array(

                     'full_name' => "$user_name_from_backend",

                     'email' => "$user_email_from_backend",

                     'lang' => '$user_lang_from_backend',

                     'htmleditormode' => 'inline',

                     'templatelist' => 'default,basic,MyOrgTemplate',

                     'create_survey' => 1,

                     'create_user' => 0,

                     'delete_user' => 0,

                     'superadmin' => $user_admin_status_frombackend_0_or_1,

                     'configurator' =>0,

                     'manage_template' => 0,

                     'manage_label' => 0);

}

     // If user should be denied access, return an empty array

     // return Array();

An example of using a hook with Atlassian's Crowd as a backend is available here.

User name mapping

In case some users have an external username that is different from their LimeSurvey username, you may find usefull to use a username mapping. This is done in LimeSurvey by using the $userArrayMap parameter. For instance imagine you don't have an 'admin' username defined in your external authentication database. Then in order to login to LimeSurvey as admin, you'll have to map your external username let's call it 'myname' to the admin login name ine LimeSurvey. The corresponding setup is :

 $userArrayMap = Array ('myname' => 'admin');

After a successful authentication with the 'myname' login and password to the webserver, you'll be directly authorized to use LimeSurvey as the 'admin' user.

This obviously has serious security implications, so use it with care, and please protect your config.php from write access by the Webserver.

Use one time passwords

(since 1.81)

Since version 1.81 the user can call the limesurvey login at /limesurvey/admin and pass username and a one time password which was previously written into the users table (column one_time_pw) by an external application.

This setting has to be turned on ($use_one_time_passwords = true;) to enable the usage of one time passwords (default = off/false). More information can be found at "Manage Users".

Advanced Path Settings

If possible do no touch these settings. Additionally these settings can only be adjusted on config-defaults.php.

• $homeurl: This should be set to the URL location of your administration scripts. These are the scripts in the /limesurvey/admin folder. This should be set to the WEB URL location - for example "http://www.mydomain.com/limesurvey/html/admin". Don't add a trailing slash to this entry. The default setting in config.php attempts to detect the name of your server automatically using a php variable setting - {$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']}. In most cases you can leave this and just modify the remainder of this string to match the directory name you have put the LimeSurvey scripts in.
• $publicurl: This should be set to the URL location of your 'public scripts'. The public scripts are those located in the "limesurvey" folder (or whatever name you gave to the directory that all the other scripts and directories are kept in).
• $tempurl: This should be set to the URL location of your "/limesurvey/tmp" directory - or a directory which you would like LimeSurvey to use to store temporary files, including uploads. This directory must be set to read & write for your webserver (e.g. chmod 755)
• $imagefiles: By default you should leave this pointing to the URL location of /limesurvey/admin/images - where the images are installed initially. You may, however, prefer to move these images to another location and if so point this to the URL directory where they are stored.
• $homedir: This should be set to the physical disk location of your administration scripts - for example "/home/usr/htdocs/limesurvey/admin". Don't add a trailing slash to this entry. The default setting in config.php attempts to detect the default root path of all your documents using the php variable setting - {$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']}. In most cases you can leave this and just modify the remainder of this string to match the directory name you have put the LimeSurvey scripts in.
• $publicdir: This should be set to the physical disk location of your 'public scripts'.
• $tempdir: This should be set to the physical disk location of your /limesurvey/tmp directory so that the script can read and write files.
• $fckeditordir: url of the fckeditor script
• $fckeditexpandtoolbar: defines if the FCKeditor toolbar should be opened by default
• $pdfexportdir: Directory with the tcpdf.php extensiontcpdf.php
• $pdffonts: Directory for the TCPDF fonts