Firefly III is a free, open-source personal finance management software written in PHP. It helps you keep track of your expenses, income, budgets, and others aspect of your finances from a self-hosted server in your own home and environment. If you love tracking your finances, Firefly III should be right for you. You can track recurring transactions, and create double-entry bookings securely with 2-factor authentication. Whether you’re managing personal or business finances, Firefly III can help you build and manage your content on every device with its intuitive and powerful user and admin dashboard. For more on Firefly III, please visit its home page To get started with installing Firefly III, follow the steps below:

Install Nginx

Nginx HTTP Server is probably the second most popular web server in use today, so install it since Firefly III needs it. To install Nginx HTTP on the Ubuntu server, run the commands below. After installing Nginx, the commands below can be used to stop, start and enable the Nginx service to always start up with the server boots. To find out if the Nginx HTTP server is installed, simply open your web browser and type in the server’s IP or hostname. When you see a page similar to the one below, then Nginx is installed and working.

Install MariaDB

Firefly III also needs a database server to store its content, and the MariaDB database server is a great place to start when looking at open-source database servers to use with Firefly III. To install MariaDB run the commands below. After installing MariaDB, the commands below can be used to stop, start and enable the MariaDB service always to start up when the server boots. After that, run the commands below to secure the MariaDB server by creating a root password and disallowing remote root access. When prompted, answer the questions below by following the guide.

Enter current password for root (enter for none): Just press the Enter Set root password? [Y/n]: Y New password: Enter password Re-enter new password: Repeat password Remove anonymous users? [Y/n]: Y Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n]: Y Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n]:  Y Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n]:  Y

Restart MariaDB server To test if MariaDB is installed, type the commands below to logon into the MariaDB server sudo mysql -u root -p Then type the password you created above to sign on. If successful, you should see MariaDB welcome message

Install PHP 7.4-FPM

PHP 7.4-FPM may not be available in Ubuntu default repositories. To install it, you will have to get it from third-party repositories. Run the commands below to add the below third-party repository to upgrade to PHP 7.4-FPM. Then update and upgrade to PHP 7.4-FPM. sudo apt update Next, run the commands below to install PHP 7.4-FPM and related modules. After installing PHP 7.4, run the commands below to open the PHP default config file for Nginx. Then make the changes on the following lines below in the file and save. The value below is a great setting to apply in your environment. After making the change above, save the file and close it.

Create Firefly III Database

Now that you’ve installed all the packages that are required, continue below to start configuring the servers. First, create a Firefly III database. Run the commands below to log on to MariaDB. When prompted for a password, type the root password you created above. Then create a database called firefly Create a database user called fireflyuser with a new password Then grant the user full access to the firefly database. Finally, save your changes and exit.

Download Firefly III Latest

To get Firefly III’s latest release you may want to use the GitHub repository. Install Composer, Curl and other dependencies to get started. After installing curl and Composer above, change into the Nginx root directory and download Firefly III packages from Github. After downloading, you should see a success message similar to the one below: Next, edit the .env file create above and make the highlighted changes to suit your environment. Make the highlighted changes. Save the file and exit. Next, go back to the Firefly III root directory and update all packages and requirements. Since you just ran the web server as root, you should make sure any newly created files are owned by the www-data user and group. To do that, run the commands below:

Configure Nginx

Finally, configure the Apahce2 site configuration file for Firefly III. This file will control how users access Firefly III content. Run the commands below to create a new configuration file called firefly.conf Then copy and paste the content below into the file and save it. Replace the highlighted line with your domain name and directory root location. Save the file and exit. After configuring the VirtualHost above, enable it by running the commands below Then open your browser and browse to the server domain name or hostname. This is often localhost but can be a hostname or IP address. Your server admin or hosting company will have this information available. http://example.com/ Create an admin account and register. Log in and begin setting up your finances. Conclusion: This post showed you how to install Firefly III on Ubuntu. If you find any errors above, please leave a comment below.