Simply Installing ERPNext in Ubuntu 20.04

4 min readNov 20, 2020

Anyone who is trying to install ERPNext will be encountered with a lot of issues. Official documentation are written like we shouldn’t install it. That’s why i decided to write a note regarding ERPNext installation in ubuntu.

1. Get a Server

Let’s start with Renting a VPS from AWS / DigitalOcean, Linode or from someone else. Or simply virtualhost your computer and install a ubuntu.

This tutorial is aimed to install ERPNext and point a public domain to it. Please point your domain A record to installation server in order to achieve that.

2. Update and upgrade your system

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y

3. Configure Firewall

Erpnext requires 22,25,143,80,443,3306,8000 ports. We need to allow these ports in firewall.

sudo ufw allow 22,25,143,80,443,3306,8000/tcp 
sudo ufw enable

4. Update Locales

Character encoding and keyboard mapping will affect ERPNext installation and deployments. It’s better to fine tune it.

To Configure:

sudo localectl set-keymap us && sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8

We also need to modify /etc/environment file. To do that

sudo nano /etc/environment

And paste the the following content to it:

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Save the changes (Ctrl + O).

Reboot your system

sudo reboot

5. Install MariaDB and configure it.

sudo apt install mariadb-server
sudo apt install python3-mysqldb libmysqlclient-dev
sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo mysql_secure_installation

Then Open /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/mariadb.cnf and paste the following ERPNext default configuration template into it.

[mysqld]# GENERAL #
user = mysql
default-storage-engine = InnoDB
socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
pid-file = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.pid# MyISAM #
key-buffer-size = 32M
myisam-recover = FORCE,BACKUP# SAFETY #
max-allowed-packet = 256M
max-connect-errors = 1000000
innodb = FORCE# DATA STORAGE #
datadir = /var/lib/mysql/# BINARY LOGGING #
log-bin = /var/lib/mysql/mysql-bin
expire-logs-days = 14
sync-binlog = 1# REPLICATION #
server-id = 1# CACHES AND LIMITS #
tmp-table-size = 32M
max-heap-table-size = 32M
query-cache-type = 0
query-cache-size = 0
max-connections = 500
thread-cache-size = 50
open-files-limit = 65535
table-definition-cache = 4096
table-open-cache = 10240# INNODB #
innodb-flush-method = O_DIRECT
innodb-log-files-in-group = 2
innodb-log-file-size = 512M
innodb-flush-log-at-trx-commit = 1
innodb-file-per-table = 1
innodb-buffer-pool-size = 5462M
innodb-file-format = barracuda
innodb-large-prefix = 1
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
character-set-server = utf8mb4
character-set-client-handshake = FALSE
max_allowed_packet = 256M# LOGGING #
log-error = /var/lib/mysql/mysql-error.log
log-queries-not-using-indexes = 0
slow-query-log = 1
slow-query-log-file = /var/lib/mysql/mysql-slow.log# CONNECTIONS #pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
bind-address = 0.0.0.0[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8mb4[mysqldump]
max_allowed_packet=256M

Then, Restart mariadb

sudo systemctl restart mariadb

6. Install dependencies

sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt install -y curl build-essential python3-testresources python3-setuptools python3-dev libffi-dev python3-pip libcurl4 dnsmasq fontconfig git htop libcrypto++-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev libxext6 libxrender1 libxslt1-dev libxslt1.1 libffi-dev ntpdate postfix python3-dev python-tk screen vim xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base zlib1g-dev apt-transport-https libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev libcups2-dev pv libjpeg8-dev libtiff5-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev libdate-manip-perl logwatch

Next, upgrade pip tools

sudo -H python3 -m pip install --upgrade setuptools cryptography psutil

Install Nodejs and yarn

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo bash -
sudo apt install nodejs -y
sudo npm install -g yarn

ERPNext requires wkhtmltopdf version 0.12.5 to generate pdfs. We can install it with:

cd /tmpwget https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/releases/download/0.12.5/wkhtmltox_0.12.5-1.bionic_amd64.debsudo dpkg -i wkhtmltox_0.12.5-1.bionic_amd64.debsudo cp /usr/local/bin/wkhtmlto* /usr/bin/sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/wk*#test
wkhtmltopdf -V

Install Redis

sudo apt install redis-server
sudo systemctl enable redis-server
sudo service redis-server start

7. Create User and login in

sudo adduser bench
sudo usermod -aG sudo bench
su - bench

All commands from now on should be run as new user.

8. Install Frappe Bench

Clone frappe-bench repo first:

git clone https://github.com/frappe/bench /home/bench/.bench --depth 1 --branch master

Install Bench

sudo pip3 install -e /home/bench/.bench

Extend Ubuntu’s file watch limit,

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Initialise Frappe

bench init /home/bench/frappe-bench --frappe-path https://github.com/frappe/frappe --frappe-branch version-12 --python python3

Don’t mind the errors and warnings you get.

9. Installing ERPNext 12

cd ~/frappe-bench

Install some libraries

./env/bin/pip install numpy==1.18.5 && ./env/bin/pip install pandas==0.24.2

Please wait for some minutes to complete installing Numpy and Pandas. It may take upto 20 minutes.

bench get-app erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext --branch version-12

Create new site

bench new-site foo.bar

Replace foo.bar with you domain name. You’ll be then prompted to type your MySQL root password and Site Administrator Password.

Install ERPNext into newly created site.

bench --site foo.bar install-app erpnext

Replace foo.bar with your site domain

Start bench

bench start

Wait for few moments to Rebuild all frontend elements

Woohoo!. We’ve successfully installed ERPNext.

10. Configure ERPNext

Now we can configure our installation. You can access your installed ERPNext from localhost:8000 or remote_ip_address:8000

You’ll get a configuration prompt in browser. Complete it.

11. Set Up for Production

Although your ERPNext 12 application is ready, the system as a whole is not yet prepared for production. We need Nginx and Supervisor to host it.

Go to working directory

cd ~/frappe-bench

Turn on Multi-tenancy if you want by:

bench config dns_multitenant on

And, setup production by:

sudo bench setup production

You can now stop all processes by:

sudo supervisorctl stop all

And start process by:

sudo supervisorctl start all

That’all.

Please comment If you’ve encountered any problem during installation. I’ll try to reply as soon as possible.