Invoice Ninja has a few system requirements. Built on top of Laravel it requires a PHP and MySQL server at a minimum with the following version and extensions installed.
On ubuntu this should be as simple as running:
sudo apt install php7.4-bcmath php7.4-gmp php7.4-fileinfo php7.4-gd php7.4-json php7.4-mbstring php7.4-pdo php7.4-xml php7.4-curl php7.4-zip php7.4-gmp php7.4-mysqlnd
Technically computers has a very helpful step by step guide on how to install Invoice Ninja v5 from scratch onto CentOS, you can access the guide here. If Ubuntu is more your flavour you can follow his awesome guide here
If Arch Linux is more your flavor, brackenhill-mob from our forum has a very thorough step by step installation guide here
A prebuilt zip can be downloaded from our GitHub release page here. You will need to download the package which is appended with -release, download the file named invoiceninja.zip.
Unzip this file into the virtual host directory you have created.
/var/www/html you would set the ownership like this.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
A sample NGINX configuration is provided below, it assumes you have PHP 7.4 installed with the PHP FPM extension installed
server {
listen 80;
server_name invoiceninja.test;
root /var/www/invoiceninja/public;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
client_max_body_size 20M;
gzip on;
gzip_types application/javascript application/x-javascript text/javascript text/plain application/xml application/json;
gzip_proxied no-cache no-store private expired auth;
gzip_min_length 1000;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location ~* \.pdf$ {
add_header Cache-Control no-store;
}
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q= last;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
Enable gzip in your webserver configuration, this will dramatically improve the loading time of the application! Please see the above nginx configuration for a sample of how to load the components of the application with gzip.
Create a database on your MySQL compatible server and add a user that has full access to the database, database configuration is out of the scope of this article, more information can be found here
sudo -u www-data crontab -e
Invoice Ninja relies heavily on the Laravel Scheduler, for this to operate it requires that a cron job to be configured, edit your crontab and enter the following record.
* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
If you are using shared hosting, then you will need to add an additional parameter to the cron command which looks like this:
* * * * * cd /path/to/root/folder && /usr/bin/php -d register_argc_argv=On artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
For power users installing the app from Github can be done with the following steps
git clone https://github.com/invoiceninja/invoiceninja.git
git checkout v5-stable
composer install --no-dev -o
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
php artisan optimize
Once you have configured your virtual host, create a database and point your browser to http://your.domain.com/setup - the setup process will check a number of system settings such as PDF generation, database and mail settings and also allow you to configure the first account on the system, click Submit and the app will setup your application and redirect you to the login page
Invoice Ninja relies heavily on the Laravel Scheduler, for this to operate it requires that a cron job to be configured, edit your crontab and enter the following record
sudo -u www-data crontab -e
* * * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
Some Webservers require the Cronjob to end with > /dev/null 2>&1 instead of >> /dev/null 2>&1 for it to work.
Also check if your Webserver Cronjob needs to be set with /private_html/ instead of /public_html/ within the path.
And sometimes it's enough to put php instead of /opt/alt/php73/usr/bin/php in the cronjob scheduler command to execute.
If you still encounter errors, it may be helpful to temporarily remove >> /dev/null 2>&1 from the cron, this should output the cron to the cron.log
If you are having troubles with your crons, have a look at the troubleshooting section here
If you would like to improve the performance of your Invoice Ninja installation, then turning on the queue system will dramatically improve the performance of the application.
If you have root access to your system, then simply follow the Laravel guide to configure the supervisor service to start and restart your queue.
You will then need to update the QUEUE_CONNECTION variable in the .env file as follows:
QUEUE_CONNECTION=database
If you are on shared hosting, it is possible to get the queues working by defining a new cron with the following configuration:
*/5 * * * * cd /path/to/root/folder && /usr/bin/php -d register_argc_argv=On artisan queue:work --stop-when-empty
This cron will start a queue worker every 5 minutes and run any jobs that are in the queue and then gracefully terminate itself. This means any emails / notification may be queued for a small period of time prior to executing. If this amount of delay is acceptable, it is a great way to get queue's working on shared hosting.
We have tested Invoice Ninja v5 on shared hosting and can confirm that it does work. Softaculous has a one click installer which makes the entire setup process simple, however if you do not have Softaculous available it may still be possible to install Invoice Ninja. There are several checks you will need to do prior to confirming whether your Shared Host has the correctly enabled modules. Invoice Ninja relies on:
Without these modules, you will not be able to run Invoice Ninja. We do include some preflight checks of these modules in the Setup workflow, but it is best to check with your host that they support these modules. Some hosts choose to disable these modules as they classify them as security risks.
Create a MySQL compatible database in your shared host control panel along with a database user, record the database name, username and password as you'll need this later. Ensure your database user has full access to the database you've just created.
Download the latest release from our Releases page. Note, you'll want to find the latest release which will contain 3 files, the one you need will be annotated as invoiceninja.zip.
Upload this file to your shared host, typically if your webhost uses the industry standard cPanel, you'll want to upload the invoiceninja.zip file to the public_html directory. Once the upload has completed, using the file manager unzip the file.
Navigate to https://your.url.com/setup and fill in the form. The setup process will perform some pre flight checks and then attempt run the setup. If it has been successful you will be navigated to the Admin portal. If the setup fails for some reason, you'll be returned to the Setup screen with an error message, there may be additional errors reported in storage/logs/laravel.log that will provide more information where the setup has failed.
If you see a 404 webserver error and use sub.domain.com make sure to point the path for the subdomain towards the /public folder from the extracted invoiceninja.zip file, for example: /domains/domain.com/public_html/invoices2/public/
Add the Laravel scheduler cron job, be sure to include the full path, for a cPanel host it should look like this:
* * * * * cd /path/to/root/folder && /usr/bin/php -d register_argc_argv=On artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1
If you prefer to use Docker, we have a dedicated repository with detailed instructions on how to get started HERE
When configuring your email, please ensure all of the fields are filled in. In particular you must include the MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS and MAIL_FROM_NAME to prevent errors such as
Address in mailbox given [ ] does not comply with RFC 2822, 3.6.2.
Here is a full example - using Gmail as an example.
MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USERNAME="your_email_address@gmail.com"
MAIL_PASSWORD="your_password_dont_forget_the_quotes!"
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=tls
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS="your_email_address@gmail.com"
MAIL_FROM_NAME="Full Name With Double Quotes"
Invoice Ninja supports Open Exchange for currency conversion. Open Exchange currently provides a free tier which is suitable for daily updates of the exchange rates. Simply insert a Open Exchange API key into your .env file to enable exchange rate updates:
OPENEXCHANGE_APP_ID=your_open_exchange_api_key_here
Make sure to update your cache afterwards:
php artisan optimize