How to host Akaunting on Digitalocean Droplet - ServerAvatar

Akaunting is an open-source platform designed to optimize financial management workflows for organizations. It provides essential tools for accounting, invoicing, and expense tracking, ensuring accessibility for both administrators and users. DigitalOcean is a dependable hosting option for Akaunting, providing scalable infrastructure and simple deployment solutions. ServerAvatar enhances the ease of deploying the Akaunting application on the DigitalOcean VPS and provides a simplified and user-friendly experience.

Create Server in Digitalocean

Digitalocean is one of the most popular cloud platforms right now. It offers on-demand cloud computing for various use cases as well as some managed solutions. We can deploy any PHP-based applications on Digitalocean Droplets. Droplets are the servers or cloud computing instances in Digitalocean. If you want to learn about droplet management in-depth in Digitalocean, We recommend you to read our Digitalocean guide.

To deploy any application on Digitalocean, We first need a Droplet. So, we will first create a droplet and perform the initial setup.

Step 1: Go to the Create Droplets page.

Log in to your Digitalocean account and click on the Create button given on the top-right corner of the page. From the drop-down menu, click on the Droplets option to see a droplet creation form.

Step 2: Choose Region

On the Droplet creation page, you will find several sections for selecting different options. We will proceed step by step.

The first thing you have to do is select the region for your droplet. Digitalocean provides a number of options when it comes to selecting the location. The general rule is to select the region that is closest to your audience. It means that for the majority of your audience, Your sites will load faster due to low latency.

Step 3: Choose an Image or an OS

In this step, you have to select the operating system for your droplet. The Akaunting application required Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or a later version for compatibility and support.

However, We recommend you to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS x64 or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS x64. These operating systems are required if you use ServerAvatar to manage your droplets.

Step 4: Choose the size of the Droplet

Here you have to choose the size of your Droplet. As we mentioned above, Digitalocean provides many different types of droplets. Select the one that fits best for your project.

If your site is brand new and does not have much traffic, start with a small plan. Once the project starts getting traction, you can upgrade the plan to handle more visitors on the site.

Step 5: Choose Authentication Method

Now you have to select the authentication method. There are two types of authentication methods. They are as follows:

1. Authentication via SSH Keys
2. Authentication via Password

Using SSH keys for authentication is the best option. If you are not familiar with SSH keys, you can choose the password method. Make sure to set a strong password for your root user, which is the most powerful user with all the privileges on Linux OS.

Step 6: Selecting Additional Options

There are three additional options you can choose from. They are optional but important in different use cases. The additional options are:

1. Monitoring: It is a free feature by Digitalocean. It allows you to see additional monitoring data for your server.
2. Backups: We recommend you to enable full server backups if you are going to deploy in a production environment. The cost of the backups depends on the size of the droplet.
3. Managed Database: You do not need a Managed database if you are using ServerAvatar to manage sites on a droplet. A managed database is a pre-configured MySQL Droplet.

Step 7: Finalise Details

In the last step of this process, We have to enter the name of the droplet, and the number of droplets you want to create, Define any tags, and select the project. Enter all the details and click on the Create Droplet button to create a droplet.

In a few minutes, You will have the Droplet up and running. Now, We have to perform the initial configuration on the Droplet to host PHP-based frameworks and software.

Initial Server Configuration

The Initial server configuration includes the installation and configuration of various packages required to host your website. Usually, You have to write commands and modify configuration files. Luckily, With ServerAvatar, Your full server configuration and optimization can be automated.

Here are the three ways to automatically configure your server with ServerAvatar.

wget https://srvr.so/install
chmod +x install
./install

Install and Setup akaunting on cloud using ServerAvatar

Step 1: Create Database

Access the Database tab on the ServerAvatar server panel to create a MySQL Database.

Enter the credentials including Database name, Username, and Password, and click on the Create Database button.

Step 2: Create a PHP application

Access the Applications tab from the server panel to create a new PHP application.

Click the Create button and fill up the required information, including the Application Name, Domain Name, and Advanced Options for more PHP settings.

Note that:

If you want to host Akaunting on your domain, then make sure to point your domain to the current IP address of your server, and for that:

1. Log in to your domain provider site, where you buy your domain. Click here for more info about your domain name.
2. Access DNS Manager to edit your DNS records(contact the support team if you don’t find them)
3. Change the IP address of A Record of your website to the current server’s IP address. To host Akaunting on your subdomain, for example, Akaunting.yourdomain.com, create a new application with the subdomain as your primary domain and follow the same procedure. For accessing Akaunting on the subdomain, you need to add your subdomain on A Record that points to the current IP address of your server. To point to an IPV6 address, you would need to use an AAAA record.

Proceed to next by clicking on the Next step.

Now select method and service provider Git and GitHub, respectively (follow according to Snapshot).

Enter the required information as given below:
Repository Type: Public.
Deployment Key: generate new key by clicking on the Generate Key link.
Clone HTTPS URL: https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting.git
Branch: master
Deployment script:

composer install;
php artisan install --db-name="akaunting" --db-username="root" --db-password="pass" --admin-email="admin@company.com" --admin-password="123456";
composer dump-autoload;
php artisan sample-data:seed;

Enter db-name, db-username, and db-password according to the database we have created you check your database credentials in databases. Admin email and admin password are your login credentials when it is deployed on the server so you can set it any but remember them.

Move further by clicking on the Next Step.

Create a System User or choose a system user from an existing One.

Then choose PHP version 8.1 or above and leave the Custom Webroot field as it is.

After filling up all the details. click the Next Step button.

Step 3: Install and Run npm

Access SSH credentials from the dashboard of the application panel.

Make sure that in your server, Node js is installed. If it is not, then go to the Server Panel > Settings. Click on install Node js.

Login using the SSH credentials using the below command. Make sure to Replace the Username and Host with your actual credentials.

npm install;
npm run dev;

Now, the Akaunting software is successfully installed. You can go to the user interface by visiting the URL of your domain.

Tip:- It will run on HTTP, but to run it on HTTPs ServerAvatar provides a one-click solution to switch to HTTPs for that, go to the SSL Certificate in the application panel and click on force HTTP to HTTPs.