Install Dolibarr on Alibaba Cloud

By Arslan Ud Din Shafiq, Alibaba Cloud Community Blog author and Alibaba Cloud MVP.

Dolibarr is an open-source ERP CRM, suited for companies, foundations as well as freelancers. It is written in PHP and provides many features for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.

In this tutorial, you will be installing and setting up Dolibarr on an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance with Ubuntu 16.04.

Prerequisites

You must have Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) activated and verified your valid payment method. If you are a new user, you can get $300 – $1200 worth in Alibaba Cloud credits for your new account. If you don't know how to setup your ECS instance, you can refer to this tutorial or quick-start guide. Your ECS instance must have at least 1GB RAM and 1 Core processor.
A domain name registered from Alibaba Cloud. If you have already registered a domain from Alibaba Cloud or any other host, you can update its domain nameserver records.
Domain name must be pointed to your Alibaba Cloud ECS's IP address
Access to VNC console in your Alibaba Cloud or SSH client installed in your PC
Set up your server's hostname and create user with root privileges.

Setting up Your Environment

Setting up Your Server

Before proceeding with the installation of any kind of package, use the following command to update your Ubuntu system. To run this command, remember to login from non-root user with sudo privileges.

# sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Installing PHP

Dolibarr requires PHP 5.4.0 or later. In this tutorial, you will install PHP 7.2. To install PHP 7.2, complete the following steps.

You will need to install python software properties and software properties common. To do so, run the command below.

# sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties

Next, add a repository for newer versions of PHP.

# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Update the system to refresh the available repositories.

# sudo apt update

To install PHP 7.2, run the following command.

# sudo apt install -y php7.2

Installing the Required PHP Extensions:

Dolibarr requires the following PHP extensions:

php7.2-cli
php7.2-fpm
php7.2-common
php7.2-mysql
php7.2-pgsql
php7.2-sqlite3
php7.2-gd
php7.2-mbstring
php7.2-mcrypt
php7.2-soap
php7.2-curl
php7.2-zip
php7.2-xml

To install the above extensions of PHP, run the following command.

# sudo apt-get -y install php7.2-cli php7.2-mbstring php7.2-common php7.2-mysql php7.2-fpm php7.2-xml php7.2-curl php7.2-soap php7.2-zip php7.2-pgsql php7.2-sqlite3 php7.2-gd

When you installed the above extensions, Apache2 will be installed automatically as well. So you won't need to separately install Apache as a result. Last, you can run the following command to check installed PHP version.

# php --version

Installing MariaDB

Dolibarr supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. In this tutorial, you will use a MariaDB server for MySQL. By default, Ubuntu repository has older version of MariaDB server. To use new version of MariaDB, you will need to add MariaDB repository to your Ubuntu system. To do so, follow the steps below.

Verify the keys by running the command below.

# sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xF1656F24C74CD1D8

Add the repository.

# sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64,i386,ppc64el] http://mirror.nodesdirect.com/mariadb/repo/10.2/ubuntu xenial main'

Now update the system.

# sudo apt update

Install MariaDB using the following command.

# sudo apt install -y mariadb-server

Start and enable the MariaDB server so that after reboot, the server can start automatically.

# sudo systemctl start mariadb
# sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Now run the following command to enhance security of MariaDB server and set password for the root user.

# sudo mysql_secure_installation

Now connect to the MySQL shell as root user using the command below and enter your password.

# sudo mysql -u root -p

Run the following MySQL queries in your MariaDB server.

CREATE DATABASE doli CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
CREATE USER 'aareez'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '654321Ab';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON doli.* TO 'aareez'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Installing Composer

To install and set up Composer, run the following commands.

# php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
# php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
# php composer-setup.php
# php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
# sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

You can check if composer has installed successfully by running the command below.

# composer -v

Installing and Setting Up Dolibarr

To install Dolibarr, you will need to follow these steps:

Navigate to /var/www/html using the command.

# cd /var/www/html

Now change ownership of /var/www/html directory to aareez.

# sudo chown -R aareez:aareez /var/www/html

Remove index.html file using the command below.

# sudo rm index.html

Now download the latest stable release of Dolibarr using the command below.

# composer create-project dolibarr/dolibarr

Provide proof of ownership of /var/www/html to www-data so that apache server can access the required files.

# sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

Configuring the Apache server

Now you'll want to create virtual host configuration file for Dolibarr. To do that, run the following command. By doing so, a file will be opened in nano text editor.

# sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/dolibarr.conf

Copy and Dolibarr the following code and save the file.

<VirtualHost *:80> 
    ServerAdmin admin@xyz.com
    ServerName softpedia.xyz
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/dolibarr/htdocs
    DirectoryIndex index.php index.htm index.html
   <Directory /var/www/html>
        Options +FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
 ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/Dolibarr_error.log
    LogLevel warn
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/Dolibarr_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Run the command below to disable default site.

# sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

Now you will need to enable the newly created virtual host. To do so, run the command below.

# sudo a2ensite dolibarr

Now you will need to enable rewrite mod. You can do so by editing configuration file in apache2 directory or you can simply run the command below.

# sudo a2enmod rewrite

Now you will need to enable SSL engine. You can do so by editing configuration file in apache2 directory or you can run the command below.

# sudo a2enmod ssl

Now you will have to restart apache server to apply the changes and load the settings by executing command below.

# sudo service apache2 restart

Now you can access Dolibarr through your domain name or ECS IP address. For this scenario, I have accessed from the domain name http://softpedia.xyz. After you follow these steps, you'll see the following screen.

It will automatically detect your browser's language. However, you can select your desired language and click Next step. Then, you'll be redirected to following screen.

Click Start button to continue. You will be redirected to database configuration page.

Configuring the Database

Now enter the following form and click Next Step.

You will be redirected to the following page. Now click Next step.

Now you will see the following screen. Click Next step to continue.

Now you will be redirected to the following page to setup administrator's credentials. Enter the form and click Next step.

Now you will be redirected to the following page. Click Go to Dolibarr to continue.

You will be redirected to login form. Use admin credentials to login.

Installing the SSL certificate

We will install SSL certificate using Let's Encrypt with Certbot. To do so, run the following steps.

Update the package.

# sudo apt-get update

Install software-properties-common.

# sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

Add the certbot repository by running the command below.

# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

Update the package to load the added certbot repository.

# sudo apt-get update

Stop apache before issuance of SSL certificate.

# sudo systemctl stop apache2

Install python-certbot-apache by running the command below.

# sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache

Run the following command to get Let's Encrypt SSL issued.

# sudo certbot --apache -d softpedia.xyz

Select the option 2 to redirect the link to https and update virtual host settings for SSL. Then, restart apache server.

# sudo systemctl start apache2

You can access your website at https<span>://your_domain_name</span>.tld

Setting up Firewalls and Ports

Now that you have set up Dolibarr, if you have activated firewalls, you will have to define a rule in Alibaba Cloud security group for your cloud server to add exception for port 80/tcp and 443/tcp. You can enable these ports while creating ECS instance. Bu in that case that you forgot to unblock these ports, you can follow the procedure in this guide: Add security group rules.

Community

Install Dolibarr on Alibaba Cloud

Prerequisites

Setting up Your Environment

Setting up Your Server

Installing PHP

Installing the Required PHP Extensions:

Installing MariaDB

Installing Composer

Installing and Setting Up Dolibarr

Configuring the Apache server

Configuring the Database

Installing the SSL certificate

Setting up Firewalls and Ports

Read previous post:

Read next post:

Alibaba Clouder

You may also like

Comments

Alibaba Clouder

Related Products

ECS(Elastic Compute Service)

OSS(Object Storage Service)