How to configure Dolibarr

Jack Wallen takes you through the customization of the Dolibarr ERP platform, so your business can make use of this powerful solution.

Dolibarr is a full-featured ERP/CRM platform that you can deploy to your data center or your third-party cloud host. I recently covered how to quickly deploy the platform (see How to install the Dolibarr ERP/CRM platform on Ubuntu Server 22.04) and now want to guide you through what will most likely be your next steps with the service.

Upon initial installation, you’ll find there’s not much you can do with Dolibarr until you take care of setting some very basic parameters. That is precisely what we’re going to do here. Before we do that, you’ll want to make sure you have Dolibarr up and running. Once this is complete, you’ll have access to a very powerful suite of tools to help with resource planning for your business.

SEE: Hiring kit: Project manager (TechRepublic Premium)

With that said, let’s finish this setup so you can begin your journey.

What you’ll need

To finish up the Dolibarr setup, you’ll need a running instance of the platform and admin credentials, which you create during the initial installation. That’s it: Let’s get to work.

How to set up your Company/Organization

When you log into Dolibarr for the first time, you should automatically be taken to the Setup page (Figure A). If not, you can simply click the Setup entry in the left navigation.

Figure A

The first thing you need to do is click the Click Here To Set Up Mandatory Parameters link. This will take you to a page with four tabs: Company, Opening Hours, Accountant and Social Networks (Figure B).

Figure B

Go through these four tabs, making sure to fill out all relevant information. You’ll need to configure the following entries in the Company tab: Name, Address, Zip, Town, Country, State/Province, Main Currency, Email and Type of Sales Tax. You can fill out the information on the other tabs, but it’s not required.

Once you’ve taken care of that, go back to the Setup page and click the Click Here To Enable Your Modules And Applications link. In the resulting page (Figure C), you can go through and enable all of the modules you want to add to your Dolibarr ERP solution.

Figure C

To enable a module, you only need to click the ON/OFF slider until it’s in the ON position. There are quite a few modules to select from. What you should enable will depend on the needs of your business. You’ll find modules for Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, Vendor Relationship Management, Finances, Project Management, Collaboration, Electronic Content Management, Websites, third-party interfaces and System.

Don’t worry about enabling everything at once, as you can always return to Setup at any time and add modules as needed.

Once you’ve added your modules and completed the basic parameters setup, click the Home button and you’ll see a new dashboard is now ready for you to use (Figure D).

Figure D

One thing to note is that you will probably see this warning on the dashboard:

Warning, your config file (htdocs/conf/conf.php) can be overwritten by the web server. This is a serious security hole. Modify permissions on the file to be in read-only mode for operating system user used by Web server. If you use Windows and FAT format for your disk, you must know that this file system does not allow to add permissions on file, so can’t be completely safe. All security warnings (visible by admin users only) will remain active as long as the vulnerability is present or that constant MAIN_REMOVE_INSTALL_WARNING is added in Setup->Other Setup.

To fix this, go to Setup | Other Setup. In the resulting window (Figure E), type MAIN_REMOVE_INSTALL_WARNING in the Name field and add 1 for the value. Click Add to finish this up.

Figure E

If you want to edit the actual file, you can do the following:

• Use SSH to access the hosting server.
• Change into the Dolibarr htdocs directory with cd /var/www/html/dolibarr/htdocs/conf.
• Change the permission of the conf.php file with sudo chmod u-w conf.php.

Even with this file stripped of write permissions, you can still modify your Dolibarr setup, so you’re good to go.

And that’s all there is to finalizing the Dolibarr setup. This ERP solution should serve your company well for years to come.

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