How to install Monica on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial we will teach you how to install Monica on Ubuntu 16.04 VPS.
Monica is a Personal Relationship Management (PRM) system made in Laravel framework. It was built and designed specifically to help you have a bigger and meaningful relationship with your friends and family and to also help you keep track of every important detail about your friends and family.

Prerequisites

Monica requires the following:

• PHP 7.0+
• MySQL, SQLite or Postgre
• Git
• Composer

To begin, login to your server via SSH as user root.

ssh root@IP_ADDRESS -p PORT_NUMBER

Next, update the system and install the required packages.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
apt install apache2 php7.0 php7.0-mysql php7.0-xml php7.0-intl php7.0-mbstring git curl

Install PHP along with several dependencies.

apt-get install php7.0 php7.0-intl php7.0-curl php7.0-zip

Now Install MySQL on the VPS.

apt-get install mysql-server

After the installation is done, execute the ‘mysql_secure_installation’ script to secure your MySQL server

mysql_secure_installation

Enter current password for root (enter for none): ENTER
Set root password? [Y/n] Y
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

Create a fresh MySQL user and database for Monica with the commands below.

mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE monica;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON monica.* TO 'monicauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOURPASSWORD';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> \q

Reminder to swap ‘YOURPASSWORD’ with an actual strong password of your choosing.

Duplicate the Monica git repository.

mkdir /var/www/html/monica
git clone https://github.com/monicahq/monica.git /var/www/html/monica/

Swap the permissions of the Monica directory.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/monica

Install ‘nodejs’ which is required for ‘npm’.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
apt-get install -y nodejs

Now, you must install Composer, which you can do with the following.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '669656bab3166a7aff8a7506b8cb2d1c292f042046c5a994c43155c0be6190fa0355160742ab2e1c88d40d5be660b410') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

After this is done, run composer in the directory the repository has been cloned in order to install Monica’s dependencies.

cd /var/www/html/monica

composer install
Create ‘.env’ file with the example given and update it with your information.

cp .env.example .env
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=monica
DB_USERNAME=monicauser
DB_PASSWORD=YOURPASSWORD
DB_TEST_DATABASE=monica_test
DB_TEST_USERNAME=monicauser
DB_TEST_PASSWORD=YOURPASSWORD

Execute the command below to generate an application key. It should set ‘APP_KEY’ with the correct value automatically.

php artisan key:generate
Application key [base64:j8RgNwHGsqir1ovhDWXYlEa6P2ODNBwRGMaQTm4ZBTs=] set successfully.

Run every migration by executing the command below.

php artisan migrate

Enable avatar uploads for the contacts made in Monica.

php artisan storage:link
The [public/storage] directory has been linked.
Increase the activity types and countries table
php artisan db:seed --class ActivityTypesTableSeeder
php artisan db:seed --class CountriesSeederTable

To make the reminders work correctly, you will need to set a cronjob which executes each minute with the command below.

php artisan schedule:run

After Monica is successfully installed on your server, you may access it at with ‘http://yourIPaddress/monica‘