LedgerSMB

Small and Medium business accounting and ERP

SYNOPSIS

LedgerSMB is a free integrated web application accounting system, featuring double entry accounting, budgetting, 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 1.7; the planned next minor release. Please check the system requirements for the 1.5 old stable version and current 1.6 version.

Server

• Perl 5.18+
• PostgreSQL 9.4+
• Web server (e.g. nginx, Apache, lighttpd)

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 1.15 compatible web browser is all that's required on the client (except IE8 and 9); it includes all current versions of Chrome and FireFox as of 3.6, as well as MS Internet Explorer as of version 10 and a wide range of mobile browsers.

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/1.6/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 source)

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 recognises 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 thier 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
  • dvitopdf
  • dvitops
  • pdftops

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 .

NOTE: Don't miss the "." at the end of the cpanm command! Don't forget to make sure the environment variable PERL5LIB=/home/ledgersmb/perl5/lib/perl5 points at the running user's perl5 dir Also, NEVER run cpanm as root, it's best to run it as the user you intend to run ledgersmb as when possible. This installs the cpan modules in ~/perl5 If you can't run it as the final user, don't worry, just run it as any user (eg: johnny), and make sure the environment variable PERL5LIB=/home/johhny/perl5/lib/perl5 points at jonny's perl5 dir

Setting the PERL5 environment variable is normally done by editing the initscript, or systemd service file. If you are running manually, then you will need to set and export PERL5 before running starman/plack

The following features may be selected by specifying --with-feature=<feature>:

Feature	Description
latex-pdf-ps	Enable PDF and PostScript output
starman	Starman Perl/PSGI webserver
openoffice	OpenOffice.org document output
edi	(EXPERIMENTAL) X12 EDI support
xls	Excel output filters (xls+xlsx)

Note: The example command contains --with-feature=starman for the purpose of the quick start.

When not installing as root or through sudo, cpanm will install unfulfilled library dependencies into a location which can be used with local::lib.

The in-depth installation instructions contain a list of distribution provided packages to reduce the number of dependencies installed from CPAN.

NOTES

1. For the pdf-ps target, LaTeX is required.

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':

$ sudo -u postgres createuser --no-superuser --createdb --login \
          --createrole --pwprompt lsmb_dbadmin
Enter password for new role: ****
Enter it again: ****

The pg_hba.conf file should have at least these lines in it (order of the entries matters):

local   all                            postgres                         peer
local   all                            all                              peer
host    all                            postgres        127.0.0.1/32     reject
host    all                            postgres        ::1/128          reject
host    postgres,template0,template1   lsmb_dbadmin    127.0.0.1/32     md5
host    postgres,template0,template1   lsmb_dbadmin    ::1/128          md5
host    postgres,template0,template1   all             127.0.0.1/32     reject
host    postgres,template0,template1   all             ::1/128          reject
host    all                            all             127.0.0.1/32     md5
host    all                            all             ::1/128          md5

Note: pg_hba.conf can be found in /etc/postgresql/<version>/main/ on Debian and in /var/lib/pgsql/data/ on RedHat/Fedora

After editing the pg_hba.conf file, reload the PostgreSQL server (or without 'sudo' by running the commands as root user):

 $ sudo service postgresql reload
 # -or-
 $ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql reload

Configure LedgerSMB

(Installation from tarball is highly preferred over installation from GitHub for production installs.)

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

Running Starman

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

NOTE: DO NOT run starman (or any web service) as root, this is considered a serious security issue, and as such LedgerSMB doesn't support it. Instead, if you need to start LedgerSMB from a root process, drop privileges to a user that doesn't have write access to the LedgerSMB Directories first. Most daemonising mechanisms (eg: systemd) provide a mechanism to do this. Do not use the starman --user= mechanism, it currently drops privileges too late.

 $ starman -I lib -I old/lib --listen localhost:5762 bin/ledgersmb-server.psgi
2016/05/12-02:14:57 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"

Environment Variables

All regular Perl environment variables can be used. In particular, it's important to make sure PERL5LIB is set correctly when setting up local::lib for the first time.

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/'
  

We support the following Environment Variables for our dependencies

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

All Environment Variables supported by our dependencies should be passed through to them, that includes the standard Postgres Variables and others

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: irc://irc.freenode.net/#ledgersmb
• Matrix: https://vector.im/#/room/#ledgersmb:matrix.org (bridged IRC channel)

Forums: http://forums.ledgersmb.org/

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

Mailing lists:

• https://lists.ledgersmb.org/mailman/listinfo/announce
• https://lists.ledgersmb.org/mailman/listinfo/users
• https://lists.ledgersmb.org/mailman/listinfo/devel

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 - 2019 The LedgerSMB Project contributors
Copyright (c) 1999 - 2006 DWS Systems Inc (under the name SQL Ledger)

License

GPLv2