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WebERP is an open source, web based accounting and business management instrument for Small and Medium Enterprises. It supports almost all platforms and is extremely useful as an internet store or a retail management system for business.

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 through the step by step installation WebERP web based accounting and business management system on an Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server.

Install WebERP on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

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

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

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

A Ubuntu 16.04 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 php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xmlrpc php7.0-gd

Step 3. Installing WebERP on Ubuntu system.

First thing to do is to go to WebERP’s download page and download the latest stable version of WebERP, At the moment of writing this article it is version 4.14.1:

wget https://excellmedia.dl.sourceforge.net/project/web-erp/webERP4.14.1.zip

Unpack the WebERP archive to the document root directory on your server:

unzip webERP4.14.1.zip
cp -r webERP /var/www/html/weberp

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /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 steps carefully which will set 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 USER 'weberp_usr'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'usr_strong_passwd';
MariaDB [(none)]>CREATE DATABASE weberpdb;
MariaDB [(none)]>GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON weberpdb.* TO 'weberp_usr'@'localhost';
MariaDB [(none)]>FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]>EXIT;

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for WebERP.

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

sudo a2enmod rewrite
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 [email protected]
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 Apache web server so that the changes take place:

a2ensite weberp
systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Configuration Firewall for WebERP.

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.

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