I tinker with LimeSurvey every few months. This week I was playing with LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 18.04 running with NGINX, PHP-FPM, and MariaDB. I was constantly creating and destroying droplets dealing with NGINX and I just said screw it, I'm just going to write a script to get the whole thing up and running on a clean Ubuntu 18.04 install. Figured I'd put it here, maybe it'll help someone else get up and running or allow them to see some NGINX files that should work. I make no claims that this is the best setup, or that it's entirely secure. It simply could be a decent starting point for someone so I wanted to share it out. If this isn't allowed, please feel free to delete this post. I do wish LimeSurvey was in the DigitalOcean marketplace with optimal settings! My playground was 2 CPU 4 GB RAM.

The only requirement besides Ubuntu 18.04 is to have the domain A record pointed to the server prior to installation so that the SSL Cert can be properly created. FYI, this forces all traffic to www. domain by default, but that's easy to change in the domains sites available NGINX file. This script installs:

• Nginx
• PHP 7.3
• MariaDB 10.1.4
• Let's Encrypt Certbot
• LimeSurvey 3.17.6+190624

Script:
Read Me has full walk-through:
github.com/Gordon55M/LimeSurvey/blob/master/README.md

SSL Labs Grade:

Why not setup the DB at end of install directly ?
manual.limesurvey.org/Installation_using...line_interface_(CLI)

My first answer was going to be because I was lazy and didn't want to fuss with the config file. But after seeing your link I see it is stupid easy to do. I'll try to add that in, thanks for the suggestion!