ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution

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

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.

Built on the base image version 4.0 (Ubuntu 22.04), so the source code is much lesser and simpler.
Uses Cloudron's redis service, as requested by one of the members.
The webserver and supervisor run as a normal (non-root) user so it's a bit more secure
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.
New apps (like hrms, frappedesk) can also be added or removed easily.
LDAP Settings can be configured if needed using the included script.
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.

LoudLemur

@nj You do a lot of hard work for Cloudron. Thank you very much.

MooCloud_Matt

@nj
What you suggested is actually really hard to backup.
And it's not the best to have too many process in the same container.
Docker container differentiate from other container tecnologie to be single service container, even if they support multi services is not the best, especially for db.
Due to resources management especially.

rookiee

@nj hey thanks for doing god works, i tested it and works really well.
but i running to some problem when adding another erpnext site using different domain, seeing this message when visiting the url

You are seeing this page because the DNS record of erp.redacted.com is set to this server's IP but Cloudron has no app configured for this domain.

i'm running this command succesfully in the terminal

gosu cloudron bench config dns_multitenant on 

gosu cloudron bench new-site erp.redacted.com

i'm sorry if this sound stupid, im new to cloudron

timconsidine

@nj thanks for comments.

Strikes me that someone needs to be brave and just say 'ERPNext will not be packaged for Cloudron', as much in fairness to those who are really keen on it so they know it won't happen and they can look to self-host on a different VPS.

I don't have a dog in the fight, just trying to improve clarity and reduce "app anxiety".

There is no mechanism to "close" an entry in AppWIshlist. Maybe there needs to be one?

Of course, if I am wrong, that's fine, the exploration can continue.

subven

@timconsidine you can of course install ERPNext at Cloudron with the package provided by @nj It just needs some extra care and is not listed at the app store. Cloudron was always very open to custom package development and will push its efforts even further in the future.

There is no need to close the listing at the App Wishlist since there is still high demand for ERPNext and maybe at some point the app store will open up to list community maintained packages.

nj

To be honest I started packaging the most voted apps and ERPNext happened to be one of them. Also it saves me from installing 99 other apps now.

The good things about this package are:

I don’t need to update it anymore; I can simply update the entire system without reinstalling this package
I’m still working to bring multi-domain to it. For now dns based multi-tenancy is showing some issues but I will fix it soon
If everything goes south, I can create a backup and move it to another ErpNext installation without an issue
Cloudron totally takes care of backup and restore and I have already tested it

The bad things are:

There are two processes running (mariadb and supervisor) and cloudron will only restart the container if supervisor goes out; but maybe I’ll add a mechanism to restart mariadb myself
the backup size will be >1GB but if I’m using incremental backup this isn’t a big issue
this app is not in the app store; but I’m going to keep the package maintained, because managing an instance of Erpnext on another VPS is going to be harder than maintaining it on Cloudron because I don’t have to care about ssl, redis, backups, ldap, etc.

So, guys, I’ll leave it here. Will let you know when an update is out.

jdaviescoates

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

maybe at some point the app store will open up to list community maintained packages.

Sounds like that is in the pipeline:

@girish said in What's coming in 7.4:

Community repo (appstore)

MooCloud_Matt

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

Cloudron totally takes care of backup and restore and I have already tested it

Not really, cloudron takes a snapshot of /app/data, and your database I guess don't create a dump before that happened.
That's not really stable as a solution.

If you could like get a dump every x time, that could be a solution, even if not perfect

nj

@MooCloud_Matt you don’t need to take a database dump because the entire mariadb database lies inside the /app/data folder.

MooCloud_Matt

@nj
that is correct if you have ZFS or BTRFS, that can do a snapshot instantaneity.
But cloudron uses a simple compression or rsync, which means that from when it starts and when it stops it takes time and in that time, data could be changed and the relationship could come out corrupted.

postgress in their documentation, for example, suggests that if you want to use an fs snapshot you should stop the DB.

LoudLemur

@nj I do not know if it is permissable or even possible but how about trying to use the Cloudron Demo to setup uour ERPNext?
We could take a look at it there.

@girish ?

nj

@LoudLemur you are right in that case. I didn’t worry because my backup schedule is at 3:00AM when nobody really used the app. If you expect people to write to the database during backup that’s an issue for sure.

Fortunately, ErpNext has a solution for that. We can put the app in maintenance mode for a while, and as I have already setup this ErpNext package to allow database read operations during maintenance, only writes will fail, which means websites etc will still be working fine.

Unfortunately, Cloudron doesn’t have a scheduler or cron system that can trigger a script before starting to backup and another script after backup success / failure. If @girish added a cron format like @prebackup @postbackup and @onbackupfail or simply added those options to the scheduler manifest, it would be perfect.

Either we could put the app in maintenance mode right before backup and put the site back on afterwards . I could even run mariadb inside /run/mariadb instead of /app/data ; I would only create database backup at /app/data/mariadb-dump-datetime.sql right before backup and delete it when backup task completes.

Also I’d like to see/know how the database addon handles backups and restoration.

robi

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

Unfortunately, Cloudron doesn’t have a scheduler or cron system that can trigger a script before starting to backup and another script after backup success / failure. If @girish added a cron format like @prebackup @postbackup and @onbackupfail or simply added those options to the scheduler manifest, it would be perfect.

File a feature request for this to get it in their queue.

yusf

@nj Thanks for packaging ERPNext. Its potential is vast.

Trying out different features of it I notice that there seem to be several modules missing when compared to the ERPNext docs.

For example Automation is missing. (Though I can reach and use event producers by searching for it, or reaching /app/event-producer directly)

Perhaps that's all in order if your app is packing the core app only?

nj

@yusf I have setup frappe to install ErpNext only. If Automation is an app, you can add any apps you like. Instructions on Github. I also installed other apps after installing this package on my cloudron. Or maybe Automation module is hidden by default and you can show it from Settings, I don’t know.

nj

I spent several days to make ErpNext work with Cloudron MySQL or Postgres. Unfortunately, postgres support is still a work in progress in ErpNext upstream and the project uses some features like CREATE SEQUENCE that are only available in MySQL, not in MariaDB. That's why the current version of this package is the most stable one.

My suggestion to @staff if you can, please add the MariaDB addon alongside the MySQL addon. It should be extremely easy to add because of the similarity with MySQL. There are so many open source software that use MariaDB, and will sooner or later be incompatible with MySQL.

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ERPNext - cost-effective ERP solution