LedgerSMB

Small and Medium business accounting and ERP

SYNOPSIS

LedgerSMB is a free integrated web application accounting system, featuring double entry accounting, budgeting, invoicing, quotations, projects, timecards, inventory management, shipping and more ...

The UI allows world-wide accessibility; with its data stored in the enterprise-strength PostgreSQL open source database system, the system is known to operate smoothly for businesses with thousands of transactions per week. Screens and customer visible output are defined in templates, allowing easy and fast customization. Supported output formats are PDF, CSV, HTML, ODF and more.

Directly send orders and invoices from the built-in e-mail function to your customers or RFQs (request for quotation) to your vendors with PDF attachments.

System requirements

Note that these are the system requirements for LedgerSMB 1.9, the current development version. Please check the system requirements for the 1.7 old stable version and the 1.8 version.

Server

• Perl 5.24+
• PostgreSQL 9.6+
• Web server (e.g. nginx, Apache, lighttpd, Varnish)

The web external server is only required for production installs; for evaluation purposes a simpler setup can be used, as detailed below.

Client

A Dojo 1.16 compatible web browser is all that's required on the client; it includes all current versions of Chrome and FireFox as of 3.6, as well as MS Internet Explorer and a wide range of mobile browsers. Please note that LedgerSMB explicitly doesn't make any attempts to support Internet Explorer.

Quick start (Docker compose)

The quickest way to get the Docker image up and running is by using the docker-compose file available through the GitHub repository at:

https://github.com/ledgersmb/ledgersmb-docker/blob/1.8/docker-compose.yml

which sets up both the LedgerSMB image and a supporting database image for production purposes (i.e. with persistent (database) data, with the exception of one thing: setting up an Nginx or Apache reverse proxy with TLS 1.2 support -- a requirement if you want to access your installation over any type of network.

See the documentation on Docker Hub.

Quick start (from tarball)

The instructions below are for getting started quickly; the project's site provides in-depth installation instructions for production installs.

System (library) dependencies

The following non-Perl (system) dependencies need to be in place for the cpanm command mentioned below to work, in addition to what's documented on the How to install CPAN modules page on CPAN.

• cpanminus This can be manually installed, or installed as a system package. It may not be necessary to install cpanminus if you are only going to install from debian packages.
• PostgreSQL client libraries
• PostgreSQL server
• DBD::Pg 3.4.2+ (so cpanm recognizes that it won't need to compile it) This package is called libdbd-pg-perl in Debian and perl-DBD-Pg in RedHat/Fedora
• make This is used by cpan dependencies during their build process

Then, some of the features listed below have system requirements as well:

• latex-pdf-ps depends on these binaries or libraries:
  • latex (usually provided through a texlive package)
  • pdflatex
  • dvipdfm
  • dvips
  • pdf2ps

Perl module dependencies

This section depends on a working local::lib installation as well as an installed cpanm executable. Both should be available from your distribution's package repository (Debian calls them liblocal-lib-perl and cpanminus respectively). cpanm depends on the make and gcc commands being available.

NOTE: gcc can be removed after all cpan dependencies are installed. However, it may be necessary to reinstall it if additional modules are required during an upgrade

To install the Perl module dependencies, run:

cpanm --quiet --notest --with-feature=starman [other features] --installdeps .

NOTES

1. Don't miss the "." at the end of the cpanm command!
2. The environment variables PERL5LIB, PERL_MB_OPT and PERL_MM_OPT need to be set and that PATH needs to include the local::lib location.
3. [other features] are described in the in-depth installation instructions
4. The in-depth installation instructions contain a list of distribution provided packages to reduce the number of dependencies installed from CPAN.

PostgreSQL configuration

While it's possible to use LedgerSMB with the standard postgres user, it's good practice to create a separate 'LedgerSMB database administrator'. In this quickstart, we add a password to the postgres superuser:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -U postgres \
   -c "alter role postgres password 'CHANGE-ME' valid until 'tomorrow'"

NOTES

1. The password is only valid until the end of the day it's assigned then you can't forget to remove the password leaving a security hole

Configure LedgerSMB

LedgerSMB should be able to run without configuration. If you need specific settings, please

cp doc/conf/ledgersmb.conf.default ledgersmb.conf

and edit ledgersmb.conf to match your requirements.

Running Starman

With the above steps completed, the system is ready to run the web server:

 $ starman --preload-app -I lib -I old/lib --listen localhost:5762 \
      bin/ledgersmb-server.psgi
2020/05/12-02:14:57 Starman::Server (type Net::Server::PreFork) starting! pid(xxxx)
Resolved [*]:5762 to [::]:5762, IPv6
Not including resolved host [0.0.0.0] IPv4 because it will be handled by [::] IPv6
Binding to TCP port 5762 on host :: with IPv6
Setting gid to "1000 1000 24 25 27 29 30 44 46 108 111 121 1000"

NOTES

1. The command above does not need root privileges
2. Please don't use Starman's --user option to set the user; it badly interacts with initialization run by LedgerSMB

Environment Variables

We support the following Environment Variables within our code

• LSMB_WORKINGDIR : Optional

  • Causes a chdir to the specified directory as the first thing done in starman.psgi
  • If not set the current dir is used.
  • An example would be

  LSMB_WORKINGDIR='/usr/local/ledgersmb/' starman ...
  

We support the following Environment Variables for our dependencies

• PGHOST : Optional
  • Specifies the Postgres server Domain Name or IP address
• PGPORT : Optional
  • Specifies the Postgres server Port
• PGSSLMODE : Optional
  • Enables SSL for the Postgres connection

Please note the earlier remarks about the local::lib environment requiring the variables PERL5LIB, PERL_MM_OPT, PERL_MB_OPT and PATH being set up.

Next steps

The system is installed and should be available for evaluation through

• http://localhost:5762/setup.pl # creation and privileged management of company databases
• http://localhost:5762/login.pl # Normal login for the application

The system is ready for preparation for first use.

Project information

Web site: http://ledgersmb.org/

Live chat:

• IRC: freenode #ledgersmb
• Matrix: #ledgersmb:matrix.org (bridged IRC channel)

Mailing list archives: http://archive.ledgersmb.org

Mailing lists:

• Announcements
• User Discussion
• Developer Discussion

Repository: https://github.com/ledgersmb/LedgerSMB

Project contributors

Source code contributors can be found in the project's Git commit history as well as in the CONTRIBUTORS file in the repository root.

Translation contributions can be found in the project's Git commit history as well as in the Transifex project Timeline.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2006 - 2020 The LedgerSMB Project contributors
Copyright (c) 1999 - 2006 DWS Systems Inc (under the name SQL Ledger)

License

GPLv2