Serving self-hosted Invoice Ninja with Caddy

Invoice Ninja is an open-source platform which helps you take care of clients, invoices, payments, expenses, time-tracking, and more…
In this guide I explain how you can run Invoice Ninja on your own server with Caddy and PHP-FPM.

Prerequisites

• MySQL Server up and running
• PHP-FPM up and running
• I assume that you have already setup Caddy and know it’s basics. I have other guides if you need help running Caddy with systemd or upstart.

Download the latest version of Invoice Ninja

Download the latest version here: Download Invoice Ninja.

Setup the database

Open the MySQL console:

$ mysql -u root -p

Execute the following SQL statements to create the database for Invoice Ninja, and grant a new user access to it:

CREATE DATABASE ninja;
CREATE USER 'ninja'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'ninja';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ninja.* TO 'ninja'@'localhost';

Caddyfile

I use the following Caddyfile for Invoice Ninja:

invoiceninja.domain.com {
    root sites/invoiceninja/public
    fastcgi / unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock php
    log sites/invoiceninja/access.log
    errors sites/invoiceninja/error.log
    
    // Rewrite rules for Invoice Ninja (Laravel)
    rewrite {
        r .*
        ext /
        to /index.php?{query}
    }
}

invoiceninja.domain.com will automatically be served over HTTPS.

Installing Invoice Ninja

Installing Invoice Ninja is then straightforward: point your browser to invoiceninja.domain.com, and follow the on-screen steps.
I used Sendgrid as email provider, but you can also use your local mail server or any email service.