How To Install WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, WebERP is a free, open-source, and complete web-based accounting and business management system. With webERP, you can manage many things including, purchase orders, web store, manufacturing, sales, general ledger, and shipping. It is written in PHP and uses MariaDB as a database backend.

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 of WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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 WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing the LAMP stack.

A Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the latest version of webERP from the official website:

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/web-erp/files/webERP_4.15.zip
unzip webERP_4.15.zip -d /var/www/html

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/webERP
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/webERP

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for WebERP.

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 WebERP. 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 WebERP installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database weberp;
MariaDB [(none)]> create user weberp@localhost identified by 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> grant all privileges on weberp.* to weberp@localhost identified by 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;
MariaDB [(none)]> exit;

Step 5. Configuring Apache for WebERP.

Now we create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘weberp.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/weberp.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/weberp.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/weberp.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/weberp.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/webERP/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/webERP/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2ensite weberp.conf 
sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Configure Firewall.

WebERP runs on port 80, so you will need to allow port 80 through the firewall:

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp

Step 7. Accessing WebERP Web Interface.

WebERP will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.comand 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 WebERP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WebERP web-based accounting and business management system on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official WebERP website.