ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution

[marcusquinn]

@nj bonus points to you sir!

[subven]

Can somebody review the code?

@girish what else needs to be done so that it can be released as an unstable app in the store?

Some concerns:

• only dev branch for hrms and payment module and no release (yes I'm aware that only the dev branch exists - this has to be adressed in the future)
• does not use Cloudrons Redis
• Will some of the database mitigations break the insallation in the future?

I will wait until the unstable release at the Cloudron App Store and start testing then

[nj]

I’ve added Cloudron LDAP support. I’ll push the changes this evening.

I think I can do Cloudron redis too. Looks doable.

I think after the default site is created, I can dump the db and import that to cloudron MySQL, but still ErpNext devs recommend Mariadb support only, and it needs the database name to be the same as the db user name. Unless there’s support from Cloudron devs, it’s a blocker. But I have set db path to be inside /app/data, so backup is not an issue. Also tried migration and backup-restore, which worked fine.

Since I’m actively using it at my company I’ll keep supporting this app. Also Keycloak, Outline and Odoo.

[hakunamatata]

@nj Thanks for your hard work with this! I am looking forward to the day this becomes available in the app store us n00bs.

[LoudLemur]

@nj What is the latest on Odoo? Is it still inching its way to beta on Cloudron?

[mdreira]

@nj ERPNext 14 also have an LMS, right?

https://erpnext.com/open-source-education

[micmc]

@mdreira said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:

@nj ERPNext 14 also have an LMS, right?

https://erpnext.com/open-source-education

Seem like yes, indeed, as it is written on the quoted page. And it seems to be very powerful as well.

[mdreira]

@micmc @nj Yes.

After reviewing Odoo and Flectra, in their community and enterprise versions, I think that ERPNext is a very good option because it is 100% free software.

And it has a lot of features.

As @nebulon says, it is a cost-effective ERP solution.

[marcusquinn]

@mdreira The big gotchya with Odoo is that the most useful part of it, the Studio addon, is not in the community edition.

With ERPNext, their equivalent no-code custom data model builder is included.

[benneic]

This post is deleted!

[mdreira]

@girish @nebulon so, could erpnext be a reality in Cloudron in the short term?

(I know you are working in the new update)

[privsec]

Such a great solution and offering.

This would solve quite a few problems a client of mine is experiencing trying to solve.

Looking forward to this!

[mdreira]

Wow, this app wishlist post started at 2018…

[plusone-nick]

@mdreira Yeahhh...all good things take time, plus ERP next at the time was not what it is now lol but that's even more reason to get it onboarded now =]

[Aizat]

@plusone-nick I'm hoping the Cloudron team will support to include this formally in Cloudron soon. There might be some hindrances, but I think it should work relatively fine now, right?

[spacetime]

I add my request for ERPNext!

[infogulch]

I was able to successfully build and run the package nj published on github for the last couple of months.

It seems to work fine, though I have not had a chance to evaluate how the upgrade and backup/restore process goes (I still have concerns about how it would interact with cloudron long-term), and I've only just started setup for a few modules.

From my (limited) experience, if you want to use ERPNext, be prepared for an extended commissioning phase. The product is both wide and deep, you will be taking considerable time to learn the ERPNext system and configuring it to work with your business process. ERPNext is moderately opinionated on how things should work, an approach I generally appreciate, but I found integration to be a big task as it pushed me to shift my expectation on how things should be organized to the "ERPNext-way". To be fair, this could be as much my ignorance of ERP systems in general as ERPNext's particular obtuseness, but I suspect the truth is that any large integrated bookkeeping system will exhibit similar commissioning/integration difficulties by the very nature of its size and scope.

I don't mean to push anyone away from the product, just to lay out realistic expectations of how much effort it will take on your part to integrate a product of this scope into your business.

[nj]

I have published an update for ERPNext on Github - cloudron-erpnext-v0.20.0 This version is stable, but has breaking changes from the first release, so instead of updating you'll need to export and re-import the documents manually. This won't be necessary from future updates.

1. Built on the base image version 4.0 (Ubuntu 22.04), so the source code is much lesser and simpler.
2. Uses Cloudron's redis service, as requested by one of the members.
3. The webserver and supervisor run as a normal (non-root) user so it's a bit more secure
4. Existing apps (frappe, erpnext) etc can be updated easily from the terminal. There will be no need to update this app anymore from this point onward.
5. New apps (like hrms, frappedesk) can also be added or removed easily.
6. LDAP Settings can be configured if needed using the included script.
7. There's preliminary support for multi-site setup.

I request someone to test this package and give some feedback. Thank you.

If building the app sounds complex, you can simply use the existing package by running cloudron install --image njsubedi/cloudron-erpnext:20230104-200417-70210de70 -l erp.your-domain.tld

Note: the latest image can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/njsubedi/cloudron-erpnext/tags . Replace 20230104-200417-70210de70 with the latest tag.

[jdaviescoates]

@nj great, thanks!

@staff are you going to take a look at this and get it into the App Store?

[nj]

@jdaviescoates I doubt that because of a few reasons.

• ERPNext cannot use the MySQL addon because it needs MariaDB and needs to have exact same name for database username and the database name (eg. db_name and db_username must be same),

• ERPNext cannot use the Postgrest addon because it needs access to the database root user's password, which seems impossible to grant. There might be a possibility if that particular user had permissions to create new databases and user, which isn't possible right now.

• A separate MariaDB service is running inside the container. the database files are stored at /app/data so they can be backed up. This might not be a good idea but many apps that use file-based database are already using this so this might not be an issue.

• The frappe-bench folder is huge (~1GB) and needs to be writable at runtime. Hence the backup size grows fast.

If there's no problem running an extra background process for mariadb, and storing the data in /app/data folder, I think the team can look into packaging it. Good thing is this app doesn't need regular update as you can run bench update command to automatically update the Frappe framework and apps like Erpnext.