No Setup after Softaculous Installation

Hi I’ve installed Invoice Ninja with Softaculous for what feels like a gazilion times and my problem seems to be simple. I can’t seem to make that setup screen pop up. It takes you directly to a login screen which gets you into the main UI Dashboard. I’m self-hosted on a shared hosting. I figure this will sort out my cron and env (email) problems.

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Hey, absolutely the same here! Its driving me nuts. Im not good at all with coding. Support told me to go to troubleshooting page, but i dont know how to handle the coding tutorial. Red sign with enabel Cron Job and no Emails are working!

Would be so much easier if the setup would work after the one click install. yourninjadomain:8000/setup should bring the setup, but it redirects to the UI.

Anyone can help?

Would anyone be willing to help installing for a litte money?
Also it seems like there are a ton of problems with the V5 self hosted looking here in the forum!

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I just did a one click on Softaculous and it worked fine. There may be some missing dependencies on the server. I would suggest raising a ticket with your webhost to enquire further.

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I’m glad the one click worked out well for you. Which dependencies are required by Softaculous to run and install?

A list would help my host determine what exactly is the problem.

Same here. More info what to say to the host provider would be amazing!

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Please refer to the documentation here in regards to required modules.

https://invoiceninja.github.io/docs/self-host-installation/

I have the same problem with Softaculous, there is no proper setup after the automatic install, besides the info requested by the installer itself.

In contrast, if I download the install zip from GitHub and I unzip it in a subdomain which I then load, it will run the setup properly. Softaculous also configures the server differently, because I get /index.php in the URL after the automatic install, but I get the expected URL (no index.php showing) with the zip file installation. So there is clearly something odd with the Softaculous installer.

Note: Upon further reading in the thread I am missing a few dependencies, it seems. I have contacted my host about it, but apart from that, Invoice Ninja seems to run fine with the manual install.

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Update: so my host tells me that the “missing” dependencies are actually activated by default on PHP 7.4 on my server. So basically I have all the prerequisites to run Invoice Ninja, but the Softaculous installer, as others noted, still does not work as intended.

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Does your host have visibility why the setup isn’t completing?

same here even with version 5.1.65 from softaculous! It installs it and then i open the subdomain i installed it in sub.domain.com for example and it takes me right to the setup company name and currency window!

How can I run the setup ?

I believe Softaculous pre-configures the app so the setup screen is skipped.

You can change any of the settings by manually editing the .env file.

Cron job still is not enabled. Env. file does not work with setting up smtp!

Index.php is showing after softaculous install… How can instart the setup manually?

Cron job still is not enabled.

Free Open-Source Invoicing, Expenses & Time-Tracking | Invoice Ninja

Env. file does not work with setting up smtp!

You may need to run php artisan optimize after changing the fie

Index.php is showing after softaculous install…

Please check mod_rewrite is enabled

How can instart the setup manually?

You may see the setup screen if you delete/rename the .env file

Softaculous pre configures the first account for you - in fact you should have seen the option to add your initial username and password - you would use this to log into the application.

The SMTP configuration is done after the application is configured. You edit the .env file with your SMTP details.

Index.php is showing after softaculous install…

Please check mod_rewrite is enabled

On my own test installs mod_rewrite was properly enabled (and was working properly for other apps, i.e. Wordpress), but the rules created by Softaculous are different than the ones available by default by the Github code zip. The Softaculous installer creates /public/index.php in the URL whereas the .zip from Github just adds /#/ to the base URL. I also had issues with Softaculous installs failing to encode some parts of the code which resulted in elements failing to load, but so far I’ve not had any problems with manual installs.

My server is running Litespeed Enterprise instead of Apache, if that changes anything related to Invoice Ninja, as Litespeed is not 100% compatible with Apache rewrite rules and sometimes rules have to be explicitly written (by being a bit dumbed down) to be compatible with Litespeed. However, the Github version works perfectly fine in that regard, so in any case, there is something different and potentially breaking in the Softaculous version on some server configurations compared to the Github version.

And as far as the Softaculous installer is pre-configuring things, it would be nice to be able to be able to configure and test emails beforehand. The only way to do so after their install by adding credentials to the .env file is to create a test invoice/quote/etc and try to send it, which is then AFAIK permasaved and populates the database with trash data for no good reason.

Finally, Softaculous is always behind on version numbers and since v5 auto updates by default, it is a bit counterintuitive to rely on their out of date repository to get updates when the app iteself can keep up to date.

So all in all, Softaculous, at least on my server (and it seems others experience the same things):

  • Breaks the expected URL and possibly other stuff related to the server configuration;
  • Makes configuring email sending harder;
  • Often creates out of date installs out of the box;
  • Relies on its update system that is out of sync with official updates.

Maybe for some people it ends up being easier to use Softaculous than trying to do everything manually through CLI, but for people with decent control panel (I am myself running cPanel), just unzipping a file in a subdomain or a subfolder is so much more straightforward and reliable.

Hey, thanks for this! When I unzipped the file V5 zip file from invoiceninja.org in my
sub.domain.com - How can I start the setup to define smtp & co?!

Hey, thanks for this! When I unzipped the file V5 zip file from invoiceninja.org in my
sub.domain.com - How can I start the setup to define smtp & co?!

I can’t tell exactly how it should be done on your server as I’m not an expert and there are many variables, but personally all I had to do was to access the URL of my subdomain (after unzipping the files in a browser) and it fired up the setup. I only had to add a cron job (through cPanel) after that. Simple!

I used Softaculous to install. I had to change the default cron to not be once daily (which was the default Softaculous option). My shared host moved it from every minute to every */15 and it still works fine.

I had to remove the /public redirect from .htaccess and also change the application locations point in .env
and then change where the subdomain was pointed to be the /public subdirectory of the invoiceninja install.

I needed to edit .env to add the SMTP settings as Softaculous defaulted to MAIL_MAILER=log