How To Install Simple Invoices on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Simple Invoices on your CentOS 7.  For those of you who didn’t know, Simple Invoices is an open-source invoicing system that is completely free to use, making it perfect for small business owners. You can also use Simple Invoices to create receipts, estimates, and quotes for your company.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Simple Invoices in CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Simple Invoices on CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

yum -y update

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:

yum -y install php php-pdo php-common php-mysql

Step 3. Installing Simple Invoices.

The first thing to do is to go to Simple Invoices’ download page and download the latest stable version of Simple Invoices, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2011.1:

wget https://bitbucket.org/simpleinvoices/simpleinvoices/downloads/simpleinvoices.2011.1.zip

Unpack the Simple Invoices archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip simpleinvoices.2011.1.zip -d /var/www/html/simpleinvoices

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/simpleinvoices/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Simple Invoices.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Simple Invoices. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Simple Invoices installation:

CREATE DATABASE simpleinvoices;
CREATE USER 'siuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-passwd';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `simpleinvoices`.* TO 'siuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Edit the Simple Invoices configuration file and enter the details of the database we created:

nano /var/www/html/simpleinvoices/config/config.ini

database.params.host                            = localhost
database.params.username                        = siuser
database.params.password                        = PASSWORD
database.params.dbname                          = simpleinvoices

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Simple Invoices.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your Simple Invoices website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file using a text editor of your choice:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf

IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf

Next, create the virtual host:

mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/
nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/simpleinvoices/"
ServerName yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com
ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined

<Directory "/var/www/html/simpleinvoices/">
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 6. Accessing Simple Invoices.

Simple Invoices will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com or http://your-server-ip/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Simple Invoices. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Simple Invoices on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Simple Invoices website.