Firefly III is a free and open-source personal finance management tool. It helps users to manage their finances by tracking expenses, incomes, and investments. It is a self-hosted platform and can be installed on a server. In this tutorial, we will explain how to install Firefly III on POP! OS Latest.
Firefly III requires several dependencies to be installed on the system. Run the following command to install them.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y curl git unzip zip composer php php-cli php-fpm php-curl php-json php-common php-xml php-mbstring php-zip php-mysql php-gd php-intl php-bcmath
Firefly III needs a database to store user data. We will use MariaDB as our database server. Run the following command to install it.
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server
Once installed, launch the MariaDB shell by entering the following command:
sudo mysql -u root
Now, create a new database for Firefly III.
CREATE DATABASE firefly_db;
Next, create a new user and grant privileges to the database.
CREATE USER 'firefly_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'firefly_password';
GRANT ALL ON firefly_db.* TO 'firefly_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Exit from the MariaDB shell by typing exit;.
Now, we are ready to download and install Firefly III.
First, change the directory to the /var/www/html directory.
cd /var/www/html
Next, download the Firefly III codebase from the GitHub repository using the following command.
sudo git clone https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii.git
Once the code is downloaded, navigate to the Firefly III directory.
cd firefly-iii
Now, install the required packages and libraries using Composer.
sudo composer install --no-dev --prefer-dist
After the installation is complete, create a .env file.
cp .env.example .env
In the .env file, update the following fields with the correct values.
APP_ENV=production
APP_KEY=<generate-a-random-key>
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=firefly_db
DB_USERNAME=firefly_user
DB_PASSWORD=firefly_password
Generate a new application key by running the following command.
sudo php artisan key:generate
Now, run the database migrations.
sudo php artisan migrate --force
Once the migration is complete, populate the database with the necessary seed data.
sudo php artisan db:seed --force
Set the appropriate file permissions for the Firefly III directory.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/firefly-iii
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/firefly-iii/storage
Next, we need to configure the web server to serve Firefly III. In this tutorial, we will use Nginx as our web server.
sudo apt-get install nginx
Create a new Nginx configuration file.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/firefly-iii
Add the following configuration to the file.
server {
listen 80;
server_name firefly-iii.example.com; #replace with your domain name
root /var/www/html/firefly-iii/public;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock; # replace with your PHP version
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
Save and close the file by pressing CTRL + X, then Y, then ENTER on the keyboard.
Now, enable the Nginx server block.
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/firefly-iii /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
Restart the Nginx service.
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Now, access Firefly III by navigating to your server's IP address or domain name in your web browser.
In this tutorial, we have learned how to install Firefly III on POP! OS Latest. Firefly III is a powerful personal finance management tool that can help you track expenses, incomes and investments easily. With its self-hosted nature, it gives users full control over their financial data.
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