ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution
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ERPNext is a free and open-source integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software developed by Frappé Technologies Pvt. Ltd. and is built on MariaDB database system using a Python based server-side framework.
There are a few packaged versions on Docker Hub already, so it should be just a matter of reading a dockerfile and massaging it into the standard Cloudron packaging format. :thinking:
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They have a official Docker Build but it seems not to be suitable for production as they quote:
These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. Unfortunately, this container is not curently suited for a production environment (but we're working towards that goal!).I would love to have ERPNext on Cloudron since EspoCRM just covers a couple use cases and Monica lacks crucial features like sync with CardDAV + it's development stagnates (mobile app, features they've been working on for ages).
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@jdaviescoates My new thread was locked for being a dupe so here's another vote for ERPNext.
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@dcher I had looked into ERPNext 2-3 years ago. That project has come a long way! Looks so polished.
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Some handy stuff on the parent/sister site too: https://frappe.io/
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Demo link too, which for some odd reason isn't obvious how to get to with their on-site nav:
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@girish The feature set is crazy for something that can run on a $20/mo VPS. I manage a commercial/industrial services business out of California and have replaced our proprietary accounting, dispatching, CRM and project management software with ERPNext. All of that cost around $1,000/mo
Here's a list of modules available:
- Accounting
- Asset management
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Human resource management (HRM)
- Manufacturing
- Point of sale (POS)
- Project management
- Purchasing
- Sales management
- Warehouse management system
- Student Information system
- Hospital Information system
- Agriculture Management
- Nonprofit Organization
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@dcher Having reviewed this software and data-structure many times, I concur - it's a solid framework.
The UI isn't as feature-rich as Odoo and it lacks the community plug-ins - but it has a RAD environment for customising any of the data-structures. The demo doesn't give you access to that but it is very well thought out.
To be fair, most users wouldn't have any issues on a €6/month Hetzner instance. Maybe push to €12/month with Cloudron and a bunch of other apps.
from me -
Same question here - anything that we can do to help with this?
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I've changed my mind on this: I'm able to do everything that ERPNext or Odoo does with EspoCRM.
Espo is both faster and, as I've found from 20 years in business, better that the data revolves around the Contacts & Calendars.
ERP systems tend to revolve around the accounts, which is fine. But creating accounting systems with CRM is easier than creating good CRM with accounting systems.
I'll share what I've done with it all at some point because I understand accounting system design isn't everyone's understanding, but I'm moving as much as possible to less apps is better for user management, time-efficiency and less integration needs when the database is common. Hence, picking one and just using the others for inspiration.
ERPNext & Odoo are great - they just have limitations and annoyance that EspoCRM doesn't.
Calendars, Emails, Portals, Role-Based Permissions are all the killer features for me. Get those right and the rest is easier.
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+1 for ERPNext. Would love to see this as CLoudron app
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@marcusquinn I am not sure if I am missing something, but out of the box, EspoCRM seems to quite barebones with just core CRM modules, without many features such as Quotes, Invoices, etc that are available as a paid Extension Packs (Annual subscription plans).
So, to replicate Odoo or ERPNext Self Hosted Open Source versions involves annual payments right?
Please correct me if am wrong, but while Odoo's most attractive features are unavailable in the open source community version, ERPNext seems to be the real deal.
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@jagan yeah, I've good experience with all 3 and highly recommend Espo, although it might depend on your time and expectations.
I'm actually going to recreate the Sales Pack stuff for Espo as I think their way can be improved.
Not knowing how urgent your needs are, if they are very urgent I'd recommend Odoo paid and hosted.
If you have a little time and prefer open-source control, Espo is great.
Anything the others do can be recreated in Espo, you just have to be organised with any CRM/ERP system.
DM me if you want access to my GitLab work on Espo, I just need your gitlab.com handle to add you to repos.
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#push
There are a ton of great updates in ERPNext today and the Update rate is from beginning Version 13 quiet awsome... Please can you please please please consider adding ERPNext? This would be such a massiv impact in the Usecase of Cloudron for me...
The service for the Frappeengine kills me so hard and Coudron is soo easy... i would fund some coins if this could speed up this topic!!! -
Hmmmm why is the reaction to my question closing one thread and send the question Zons Thread where i get the answer „buy the expansions“.
Why does a paying member not get an answer? Is this just some kids toy here? Then sorry I got the intention wrong and I will not try to improve anything here!
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@fmoeller said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
Hmmmm why is the reaction to my question closing one thread and send the question Zons Thread where i get the answer „buy the expansions“.
Why does a paying member not get an answer? Is this just some kids toy here? Then sorry I got the intention wrong and I will not try to improve anything here!Que?
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@fmoeller I don't think anyone said no to anything, you just have to convince someone that packages apps to package this one. Someone that can't live without it would be the best ally, as they will be invested in keeping it updated too.
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@fmoeller I think you misunderstood. ERPNext is currently not packaged, so we try to keep all the ERPNext related discussions in this single thread. This page is simply just a place to express interest in wanting this app on Cloudron and having all interested parties in the same page (no pun intended).
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I also would LOVE to see ERPnext on Cloudron.
Please, please package the app! It would also increase my usecase for cloudron by a an incredible amount! -
I would love to have ERPNext on Cloudron!
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+1 This would be a great addition to Cloudron!
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Bumping this, unfortunately, espocrm is not an option for me since I need either Zapier or n8n integration
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@andreasdueren said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
unfortunately, espocrm is not an option for me since I need either Zapier or n8n integration
EspoCRM has web hooks you should be able to feed into n8n https://docs.espocrm.com/administration/webhooks/
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@jdaviescoates Thank, I'll look into if that's sufficient
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@dcher The Gantt Charts look nice.
Also consider Odoo Community Edition and its Freedom focused fork, Flectra, both of which have been requested in the App Wish section of the forum.
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@nebulon @girish ERPNext is looking good...I'd love to see it added officially as a Cloudron app! (I've decided to move our business to ERPNext.) Maybe they'd support adding an "Install with Cloudron" option on their GitHub page? That could bring more business customers to Cloudron I expect.
Quick notes:
- Their official docker image seems mature enough. https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker
- They also have a 1-click droplet app on Digital Ocean. (But I'd rather manage it through Cloudron...because Cloudron is beautiful and awesome.)
- There is an ERPNext integration for n8n.
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@chrishthompson Yes, totally agree. I tried several ERPs and this one really made me almost teary. Such a rich-featured ERP and they decided to make it open source.
It's a high quality made ERP. It has integration with WordPress and n8n.
Really wish it would be in Cloudron soon.
At the moment, I'm paying for a separate server just to deploy ERPnext. But it would lovely to have it in my Cloudron along with other apps I have here.
Cloudron team, please consider bringing it here
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@girish Any chance you will be able to have a look at their official package? I deployed their docker image for production in DO: https://github.com/frappe/frappe_docker
— and it works like a charm.
Why I think ERPnext is a very beautiful project: Open-source at heart, with good developers behind it, highly supportive and very community-driven project. The project has been going on for almost a decade now. -
@aizat I second this, would lvoe to see it on cloudron!
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Are there plans to bring ERPNext to cloudron soon so I can use those resources or do I have to set up and pay for another virtual machine? Because my Time is kind of running out on this one and I would rather not migrate again.
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@andreasdueren said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
Are there plans to bring ERPNext to cloudron soon so I can use those resources or do I have to set up and pay for another virtual machine? Because my Time is kind of running out on this one and I would rather not migrate again.
We're actually in the same boat, since it's a new year looking to move platforms and this would be a massive win on our side.
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@aizat Since the cloudron Teams seems to be unwilling to adopt the official docker image for the app store, do you or anyone else here have experience in installing custom docker images so I can get this thing finally set up?
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@andreasdueren I've packaged one or two things for myself on Cloudron, and I took a look at Frappe/ERPnext.
First, for the thread: Cloudron does not run Docker images "as-is." Or, if you prefer, simply because a project runs in Docker does not mean that it will immediately be runnable under Cloudron. A Cloudron app needs to be packaged up so that it will "play nicely" with the control architecture that Cloudron provides. Put simply, to get that friendly Cloudron experience, some work is needed when packaging an app.
In the case of ERPnext, it has a compose file that specifies many software services. Traefik is used for routing and load balancing (I assume); Nginx fronts the service; it seems like Frappe (the API backend) is written in Python (another service). There's worker processes of several flavors, a scheduling service, a Redis cache, MariaDB (which, for porting to Cloudron, we'd want to integrate with it's built-in DB add-on), the site creator service... and a large number of storage volumes.
Cloudron does not, to the best of my understanding, support running
docker-composefiles. As a result, to package this, we'd have to pull all of these services into a single container image. That would take some thinking, especially since Docker "likes" to have one process per container. Or, if there is another way/it is possible, I don't personally know how to package up a multi-container Cloudron application.The Cloudron team may have something else to say, but I thought I'd drop a note in the thread that helps explain why this app is a more complex proposition than others (perhaps) when it comes to packaging. Yes, it is open, and yes, it installs easily on a VM when you do a
docker-compose up. Unfortunately, that is not the same as packaging things up to run under the Cloudron framework.I use Cloudron on a Dell 7040 I bought on eBay.
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@jadudm Fair and not a problem. I'm just a little bit disappointed by the lack of communication. If it won't get packaged for a while then a short note would have been sufficient instead of letting people like me guessing whats planned next.
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@andreasdueren We are not working on packaging this. We try to leave a note when we start packaging an app. Currently, we are working on 7.1 - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/5982/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-7-1 and there's also many existing apps that need to be updated.
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For future reference, I found https://github.com/frappe/frappe/wiki/The-Hitchhiker's-Guide-to-Installing-Frappe-on-Linux . Fairly complicated!
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@girish Thank you, that makes it easier forme to decide on my next steps with ERPNext. I'll check out that guide.
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@andreasdueren Hey, sorry for the late reply. I have followed this protocol closely and it works like a charm: Youtube Video
It's fairly straightforward if you apply the same method as the video above, it uses the GitHub method that was posted here.
ERPnext is a solid system, worth the hassle. Good luck
Kind regards. -
From what I've seen looking at the frappe/erpnext system design, it looks like a lot of the service complexity comes from their "bench" system tool that provides multitenancy / "environment duplication" capabilities via their backup and restore system. From my experience being able to branch environments is vital for these kinds of tools, but... that's basically cloudron's core competency. With a bit of work cloudron could probably match any missing features that "bench" has over it.
With bench factored out and its features provided by cloudron directly, I think you'd be left with a single python service that needs redis, mariadb/mysql, and postgresql, which cloudron provides as services already.
Notes:
- "frappe" is the company and also the name of the development/deployment framework for erpnext and other applications developed by the same team
- The frappe/frappe-worker docker image referred to in the frappe_docker/compose.yaml file is built from the source in frappe dir in the frappe/frappe repo
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bench worker --queue shortcommand (and similar) runs scheduler.py:start_worker() - The queue workers are a Python RQ-based job scheduling/background task system. RQ uses redis queues
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Teaser
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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Two major issues that I ran into while testing on cloudron.
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frappe framework requires the database name and database username to be the same (its hardcoded and all over the place). When testing locally it worked but in cloudron, db name is appended with “db” and username with “user”
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frappe framework needs root access to the database, eg. password of the user named “postgres” (its hardcoded, even if —dbroot-username exists, it’s for mariadb only)
That’s why I’m running postgres server on the Docker container itself, and not use any db addons. I’ll map the db storage to /app/data so it gets backed up regularly.
See you guys with good news next time. Most apps made in Python seem to write all over the filesystem so I’m testing it on readonly environment; once done ErpNext should be available soon. Thank you for your patience.
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
frappe framework requires the database name and database username to be the same (its hardcoded and all over the place). When testing locally it worked but in cloudron, db name is appended with “db” and username with “user”
That's a pretty rough requirement
but we can fix the platform code I guess to have an option to generate such names.frappe framework needs root access to the database, eg. password of the user named “postgres” (its hardcoded, even if —dbroot-username exists, it’s for mariadb only)
Keeps getting rougher
There's no chance we will allow an app to have root db access.Is the situation any better with mariadb instead of postgresql?
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frappe framework needs root access to the database
Surely this is not actually necessary to run the app, but is just part of their custom dynamic deployment system (ick). I hope it's possible to extricate the actual app from the framework...
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@girish for the initial release, I've given up on the idea of using Cloudron addons for now. Postgres is also getting over-complicated so I think I'd stick with MariaDB. Let's see how it goes. The build-run-test cycle is quite tedious when there are all kinds of new errors to resolve. ErpNext turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.
Current status: frappe installed, up and running. ErpNext won't install, and require all its dependencies (apps) to be installed. My target is to publish it by this week.
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@infogulch said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
frappe framework needs root access to the database
Surely this is not actually necessary to run the app, but is just part of their custom dynamic deployment system (ick). I hope it's possible to extricate the actual app from the framework...
I thought so too. Unfortunately, it keeps asking for "postgres super user password".
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@nj Thanks for all your hard work. Few have the necessary skills.
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Help Needed. Please check issue on github.
I'm inches away from either successfully running ErpNext or quitting the idea of packaging it. Never had I ever stuck with this kind of stupid errors.
When everything goes smooth, one of the modules (Payment Module in particular) make the entire table crash in the middle of loading the modules. Fix one error, then another pops up, then another.
I no longer have time nor patience to package this after this week. Here's the progress.. github.com/njsubedi/cloudron-erpnext if anyone has time, skill and patience, please go ahead and continue packaging this piece of sofware.
If anyone knows people from Frappe, please tell them to stop putting spaces and uppercase letters in table names, and at least retry any database operation instead of leaving the entire database in broken state when something fails, then have the user restart the minutes long process from the beginning.
Hours spent: 100+
Please check the issue on Github
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj You might not want to hear this, but in 100 hours, you could probably reproduce anything you need from ERPNext in EspoCRM using the Entity Manager to build copies of any specific data structures and Reports for anything specific there.
That's basically a lot of what I've been doing lately, taking Espo from being a CRM to an ERP system.
We're not here for a long time - but we are here for a good time :)
Jersey/UK
Work & Ecommerce Advice: https://brandlight.org
Personal & Software Tips: https://marcusquinn.com -
@marcusquinn I could do the entire EspoCRM in Directus if I had to.
I wanted to package it because it's one of the most wanted apps, but I think it takes someone else who knows python and databases more than me.
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj After 18 months working with Espo, I doubt it, and I'm a fan of Directus too.
I see value in having ERPNext, and Odoo, packaged and available too. Even if only so that people can compare all of these similar apps, and take inspiration from all of them to make the best solution with the one they choose to develop among them.
I think you're right though, this one needs cooperation from the original author if it's not versatile enough to handle errors in building in Cloudron's tighter security Docker environment.
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Trailer
You know what's disappointing? I started packaging ERPNext for the HR module. Unfortunately, the HR Module is not available after installation. Now I'm here thinking where the hell it go, and why I spent weeks packaging something that doesn't have the particular module I was looking for.Update: Looks like
version-14of ERPNext does not have HR module. Onlyversion-13has it. Now packaging version 13.
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj said in ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution:
Looks like version-14 of ERPNext does not have HR module.
They refactored the HR and Payroll module into a "new" app --> #31467. Maybe this could still be installed within the current V14 docker app --> ERPNext HRMS installation.
PS: Thank you for your hard work
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@subven oh, wow! How did I miss that!
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but if you wish to put on a donation pot, I would be happy to contribute where I can, as a token of thanks for your hard work and time!
Thank you again for all the hard work. -
@Aizat I'm looking for someone who know MariaDB and Python3 for the project. I've successfully packaged ErpNext, but I had to patch the source code of "Payments" and "HRMS" modules that crash the database tables during installation. Instead of cash, I'm looking for few other people who would pull the repo, and see if they see the same kind of crashes.
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Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
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@nj I tried installing it to my cloudron and it built successfully, but I ran into an issue with the cloudron cli during installation saying that I need to specify a subdomain (when I clearly did specify a subdomain), then I ran out of time to mess with it until later this week.
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Okay, the errors have gone. I'd say I'm 99% done packaging. Will post the good news soon.
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Okay, here is the good news. Please try it out and let me know if it works.
If you're not ready to build the image yourself, you can simply install the image that I created.
cloudron install --image njsubedi/cloudron-erpnext -l erp.<yourdomain.tld>.ErpNext v14 is now available on Cloudron. See the README file for usage instructions.
Features
- ErpNext v14 - running on Frappe Framework v14
- HRMS Module - Includes HR and Payroll modules
- Plug n Play - Automatically configured to use the subdomain you install it on, no setup needed
- Independent - Does not depend on Cloudron Addons for redis, mysql or such
Gotchas
- Installs its own database servers, but data resides inside /app/data, so it gets backed-up, no not a big issue
- Hasn't been tested a lot, but it's working pretty fine
- Multi-tenancy isn't set up, even though that's pretty trivial to do
Good to know
- After installation, look into
/app/datafolder using cloudron's file manager for a file that ends with-credential.txt. - Raise issues on Github if you run into problems, not here.
Founder & OpenSource Lover. My Cloudron Apps
