How To Install Invoice Ninja on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Invoice Ninja on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Invoice Ninja is a free and open-source web-based application software that can be used for invoicing, payments, time tracking, and many more. It is the best solution for invoicing and billing customers. You can easily create and send invoices online in seconds. Invoice Ninja allows you to create your own custom invoice and show the live invoice as a PDF file.

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 and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Invoice Ninja on an Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic beaver).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• 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 Invoice Ninja on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server.

An Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.2 libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-common php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-soap php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-intl php7.2-mysql php7.2-cli php7.2-zip php7.2-curl

Step 3. Install Invoice Ninja on Ubuntu.

Run the following command to download the latest version of the InvoiceNinja zip file onto your server:

wget -O invoice-ninja.zip https://download.invoiceninja.com/
sudo unzip invoice-ninja.zip -d /var/www/
sudo mv /var/www/ninja /var/www/invoice-ninja

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/invoice-ninja/
sudo chmod 755 -R /var/www/invoice-ninja/storage/

Step 3. Configuring MariaDB for Invoice Ninja.

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 Invoice Ninja. 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 Invoice Ninja installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE ninja_db;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ninja_db.* TO 'ninja'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 4. Configuring Apache.

To create the virtual host configuration file for your domain, run the following command:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/iinvoice-ninja.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
ServerName invoice.yourdomain.com
ServerAlias www.your_domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/invoice-ninja/public

<Directory /var/www/invoice-ninja/public>
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride All
     Require all granted
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your_domain.com_error.log 
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your_domain.com_access.log combined 
</VirtualHost>

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

sudo a2ensite invoice-ninja.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 8. Accessing Invoice Ninja.

Invoice Ninja will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed InvoiceNinja. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Invoice Ninja on your Ubuntu 18.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Invoice Ninja website.