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If your business needs a CRM/ERP solution, you should give the open source Flectra platform a try. Jack Wallen shows you three different ways to install.
Image: iStockphoto/Lena_Datsiuk
Your business is growing and it needs more tools to keep things humming along. One such tool it could probably use is a customer resource manager/enterprise resource planning (CRM/ERP) platform. One option for this is the open source Flectra.
Flectra offers plenty of features to help your business grow with the demand, and do so with ease. Flectra has you covered for:
Sales
CMS
POS
Projects
Helpdesk
Marketing automation
Manufacturing
CRM
Accounting
Purchasing
Inventory
HR
This tool is, quite literally, a one-stop-shop for many of your backend business needs. Let’s get Flectra up and running.
Activate the new virtual environment with the command:
source flectra-venv/bin/activate
We now need to modify the Flectra requirements file to reflect a change in the Python requirements (from version 2.8.3 to 2.8.5). Open the requirements file with the command:
Open a web browser and point it to http://SERVER_IP:7073 (where SERVER_IP is either the IP address or domain of your server). You will be greeted by the database configuration page (Figure A).
Figure A
The Flectra database configuration page.
Fill out the necessary items for the database and click Create Database. Once the database creation completes, the Flectra dashboard will appear so you can get to work (Figure B).
Figure B
The Flectra dashboard ready for you to install all of the modules you need.
How to get around installation issues
If, after the database installation completes, you receive an Error 500, I’m going to give you this bit of advice–don’t try to fix it. Instead, you’ll want to go a completely different route. What I did was move over to a Ubuntu 18.04 server, download the official .deb file (you have to register for this) and then issue the following command:
sudo dpkg -i flectra*.deb
The installation will error out because of dependency issues. To fix that, issue the command:
sudo apt-get install -f
That installation should complete and you can point your browser to the same address you used above. If, however, that method fails you, there’s one other option.
You can also deploy Flectra with docker using the following commands (this method will definitely work):
docker run -d -e POSTGRES_USER=flectra -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=flectra --name db postgres:9.4
docker run -p 7073:7073 --name flectra --link db:db -t flectrahq/flectra
Note: The second docker command above does take some time to run (up to 10 minutes or so). Don’t get impatient with it–give it time to complete.
Once the container has deployed, you should then be able to access Flectra. The difference is, you won’t have to create a database. You’ll be presented with a login screen (the login credentials are admin/admin) and then you’ll find yourself within the Flectra dashboard.
One way or another, you should be able to get Flectra up and running and serving your CRM/ERP needs. This tool is powerful enough that it’s worth the time and effort.
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