Manually Install Frappe on Ubuntu 14.04 With a Remote SQL Server

Frappe is a full stack web framework based on Python and Javascript which can be used to build and deploy web applications. The main focus of this post is to set up a Frappe environment that can be used for ERPNext.

Before starting, install MariaDB 10.x on a remote host (or local, but that’s less common in a production environment) as we’ll use that later.

Create a user for Frappe – here we’ll use frappe but you can change this for anything you like. If you do change the user remember to update the home directory.

useradd -d /home/testuser -m -d /home/frappe frappe

Set the password for the frappe user with passwd.

passwd frappe

Install the required dependencies. Notice that we’ve not included an SQL server as we’ll use a remote MariaDB SQL Server.

apt-get update
apt-get install -y python-dev python-setuptools build-essential python-mysqldb git ntp vim screen htop libmariadbclient-dev  libxslt1.1 libxslt1-dev redis-server libssl-dev libcrypto++-dev postfix supervisor python-pip fontconfig libxrender1 libxext6 xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base cron mysql-client curl nginx

Download and install the latest version of wkhtmltopdf from Sourceforge.

cd /tmp/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/wkhtmltopdf/files/0.12.2.1/wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-trusty-amd64.deb/download
dpkg -i download
apt-get -f -y install

Download Frappe from Github as the frappe user.

su - frappe
cd /home/frappe
git clone https://github.com/frappe/bench bench-repo
exit

Run the pip installer for Frappe.

pip install -e bench-repo

Create a new Bench as the frappe user.

su - frappe
bench init frappe-bench && cd frappe-bench

Add the default site configuration file with the remote SQL database hostname/ IP and port number.

vi /home/frappe/frappe-bench/sites/common_site_config.json

And add:

{
 "db_host": "database.host.com",
 "db_port": "3306"
}

Before you create any sites, you’ll need to apply a few settings to your SQL server. This guide assumes you have a remote MariaDB SQL Server – log into it and add the below to your my.conf file.

vi /etc/mysql/my.conf

[mysqld]
innodb-file-format=barracuda
innodb-file-per-table=1
innodb-large-prefix=1
character-set-client-handshake = FALSE
character-set-server = utf8mb4
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci

And restart your SQL server for the changes to take affect.

service mysql restart

Copy the Supervisor config file into place so that Frappe automatically starts up with the system.

cp /home/frappe/frappe-bench/config/supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/