Installing Akaunting on CentOS 7

Akaunting is a free, open source and online accounting software designed for small businesses and freelancers. It is built with modern technologies such as Laravel, Bootstrap, jQuery and RESTful API. Akaunting’s source is on GitHub. This guide will show you how to install Akaunting on a fresh CentOS 7 Vultr instance.

Requirements

• PHP 5.6.4 or higher with the following PHP extensions:
  • PDO
  • OpenSSL
  • Mbstring
  • Tokenizer
  • XML
  • Zip
  • cURL
• MariaDB
• Nginx

Check the CentOS version.

cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core)

Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it.

useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe

NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.

Set up the timezone.

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo yum update -y

Install necessary packages.

sudo yum install -y curl git wget vim unzip bash-completion

Disable SELinux.

sudo setenforce 0

Enable the EPEL repository.

sudo rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Install PHP

Setup the Webtatic YUM repo.

sudo rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

Install PHP and required PHP extensions.

sudo yum install -y php72w php72w-cli php72w-fpm php72w-common php72w-mbstring php72w-xml php72w-mysql php72w-pgsql php72w-sqlite3 php72w-zip php72w-curl

Check the version.

php --version

Start and enable php-fpm.

sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service

Install MariaDB

Install MariaDB.

sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo

# Copy/paste this to the /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo file

[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = https://yum.mariadb.org/10.2/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1

sudo yum install -y MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

Check the version.

mysql --version

Start and enable MariaDB.

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Run the mysql_secure_installation script to improve the security of your MariaDB installation.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Log into MariaDB as the root user.

mysql -u root -p
# Enter password:

Create a new MariaDB database and user. Remember the credentials for this new user.

CREATE DATABASE dbname;
GRANT ALL ON dbname.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Install Nginx

Install Nginx.

sudo yum install -y nginx

Check the version.

sudo nginx -v

Start and enable Nginx.

sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Configure Nginx. Run sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/akaunting.conf and populate the file with the following configuration.

server {

  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  server_name example.com;

  root /var/www/akaunting;

  index index.php index.html;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
  }

  location ~ /.php$ {
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    try_files $uri =404;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
  }

}

Test the configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Install Akaunting

Create a document root directory.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/akaunting

Change ownership of the /var/www/akaunting directory to johndoe.

sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/akaunting

Download the latest stable Akaunting software and unzip it.

cd /var/www/akaunting
curl -O -J -L https://akaunting.com/download.php?version=latest
unzip Akaunting_1.1.15-Stable.zip
rm Akaunting_1.1.15-Stable.zip

Change ownership of the /var/www/akaunting directory to nginx.

sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/akaunting

Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set the user and group to nginx. Initially, it will be set to apache.

sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx

Restart php-fpm.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

Launch the installer by opening your domain name/IP address in your web browser and fill in the required information. After that, Akaunting software will be installed on your server.