How to host Akaunting on Google Cloud VM Instance - 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. Google Cloud is a dependable hosting option for Akaunting, providing scalable infrastructure and simple deployment solutions. ServerAvatar makes it easy and user-friendly to deploy the Akaunting application on the Google Cloud platform.

Create a VM Instance in Google Cloud

Getting started with Google Cloud:

Google is one of the most famous and reliable cloud providers among all of its competitors in the market. Google Cloud Platform provides a robust and comprehensive set of cloud computing services, catering to diverse business needs from startups to large enterprises. With its focus on scalability, performance, security, and innovation, GCP enables organizations to build, deploy, and scale applications and services efficiently in the cloud. Whether it's computing, storage, data analytics, machine learning, or networking, GCP offers a powerful and flexible platform for modern cloud computing requirements.

Google Cloud Platform’s Compute Engine offers robust virtual machine capabilities designed to meet the needs of modern cloud computing environments. Whether you’re looking for flexibility, scalability, performance, or integration with other Google Cloud services, Compute Engine provides a comprehensive solution for running your applications and workloads in the cloud efficiently and securely. Here’s a detailed introduction to Google Cloud as a virtual machine provider:

• Compute Engine as a primary service: It allows you to quickly scale VMs up or down based on demand, allowing you to handle varying workloads effectively. Users have the flexibility to select VM instance types tailored to their needs for CPU, memory, and disk capacities. Google provides predefined machine types optimized for different tasks, or you can customize machine types to allocate resources according to specific requirements.
• Key Features and Capabilities: It provides preemptible VMs at a greatly reduced price, ideal for fault-tolerant and batch-processing tasks. VM instances can be migrated live between host systems without any downtime, ensuring exceptional availability and reliability. Users have the option to either create custom VM images or utilize Google's pre-built images for quick deployment of popular software configurations.
• Integration with Google Services: It offers Control access and permissions for VM instances by managing IAM roles and policies. Compute Engine seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud's VPC networking, enabling the creation of secure and isolated networks tailored for your VMs. It also supports VPNs, Cloud Interconnect, and Google Cloud Load Balancing to efficiently manage network traffic. Moreover, Google's Deployment Manager can be used to automate the creation and management of VMs and associated resources following Infrastructure-as-Code principles.
• Management and Monitoring: Administer VM instances using the Google Cloud Console, which offers a graphical interface for deploying, monitoring, and managing resources. Engage with Compute Engine programmatically through Google Cloud SDK tools and APIs, enabling automation and seamless integration with other systems.
• Security and Compliance: Compute Engine incorporates security features such as encryption of data at rest and in transit, secure boot, and IAM controls to safeguard VM instances and data. Google Cloud Platform adheres to various compliance standards (e.g., ISO, SOC, GDPR), providing assurances for regulatory requirements across different industries.

Let’s get started with creating a Virtual Machine on the Google Cloud Platform:

Step 1: Creating a VM in Google Cloud Platform

• Click on the below link and log in to your Google account.

  • https://console.cloud.google.com

• Here you can create a New project or you can select the project you want, and then click on Create a VM as shown in the image below.

Step 2: Creating a VM Instance

• For creating a VM instance click on the sidebar, select the Compute Engine, and then click on the VM instances and Create Instance, as depicted in the images below.

Step 3: Configuring a New VM Instance

• Click on New VM Instance, here you can give Name to your virtual machine. Additionally, you can select the Region and Zone of your choice. Moreover, you can select the machine according to your needs from the available types. Refer to the image below.

Step 4: Select the Machine type

• Now you have the option to select a Machine Type with predefined configurations of vCPUs and memory which is suitable for most workloads. In addition to this, you can also add Availability policies according to your needs. (Recommended Standard policy)

• Also, you can customize your machine that is suitable for your workload as shown in the image below.

Step 5: Select the Boot disk

• In this step, you have to select the Operating System for your instance. Click on the Change button to select the boot disk as shown in the image below.

• Generally, the Akaunting application requires Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or a later version for compatibility and support. We recommend you to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS x64 or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS x64. If you are using ServerAvatar to manage your instance, these operating systems are required. Moreover, you can select the disk type you want; however, we recommend you select a Balanced persistence disk with a minimum 25 GB disk size, then click on the Select button as depicted in the following image.

Step 6: Firewall rules

• The next step is to allow firewall rules that are available at the time of creating an instance in Google. Select the checkbox next to the HTTP and HTTPS to allow incoming traffic. Click on the Create button to create a VM instance in Google as shown in the image below.

Step 7: Creating New Firewall Rule

• Now, you have to go to the VPC network by clicking on the sidebar and then click on the Firewall section. After that click on Create Firewall Rule as shown in the images below.

• Here you have to enter the details such as the Name of the rule and its description. You can also turn on firewall logs. In addition to this leave the network and priority sections as default. The direction of traffic should be Ingress and Allow the action. In the Targets section, you have three options: All instances in the network, Specified target tags, and Specified service accounts, select from them according to your needs. Furthermore, set the Source filter to IPv4 ranges you can specify the ranges as per your requirement in the Source IPv4 ranges input field. To understand it better refer to the image below.

• Lastly, you need to specify the Protocols and ports. ServerAvatar requires 43210 port to be open and the protocol is TCP so add the port number in that field and click on Create as shown in the image below.

• Congratulations! You have successfully created your instance in Google Cloud which is now ready to connect with ServerAvatar.

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.