Hello and welcome to our today's article on jBilling, the enterprise open source billing system. jBilling is a mature and rapidly evolving billing system that delivers a rich of set of features that provides you an easy to use and web-based billing solution. Because of its open source means you can get its source code and run it on any open source stack. You can easily customize its plugins and user friendly extensions to fulfill your special requirements that you are want in your billing system by adding bundles, creating different billing plans and solution for your products and customers.
So, jBilling is one of the best choice for you if you are thinking of developing your own billing system that includes automatic invoicing, payment processing, ordering and can be easily extended by adding new business rules.
Download jBilling
Login to your Ubuntu server using the root credentials or a user with sudo privileges. Configure its basic network settings, hostname and IP address configurations and make sure your are connected with Internet to install the necessary updates.
To download jBilling Community edition open this LINK and you will be directed to sourceforge web page where the latest jBilling package is available to download.
Alternatively you can copy the direct link to download the package on the server using 'wget' command following with the download link.
# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/jbilling/jbilling%20Latest%20Stable/jbilling-4.1.1/jbilling-community-4.1.1.zip
Setup JAVA_HOME
You need to define the JAVA_HOME or the JRE_HOME environment variable that must be needed to start the installation of jbilling on your server.
So, the first thing is that you need to install the Java on your ubuntu server and the define its JAVA_HOME environment variable by using the below command.
# apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless
To check the current JAVA_HOME or JRE_HOME environment variables you can use the below commands depending upon your Java version that you are currently using.
# echo $JAVA_HOME
# echo $JRE_HOME
If you have got the blank output, that means your JAVA_HOME is not setup, to do so you can use the below command.
# export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-8-jre
# export JRE_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-8-jre
Extract the Archive
Now moving to the installation of jbilling, extract the downloaded package using 'unzip' command and make sure that 'unzip' package utility is installed on your system, if its not then use the command below to install it first.
# apt-get install unzip
After this you can extract the package using the below command.
# unzip jbilling-community-4.1.1.zip
Setup Permissions
Change your directory to the 'bin' directory with in extracted folder of JBilling and then assign the executable permissions to all shell scripted files within this directory as shown in the image.
# cd jbilling-community-4.1.1/bin/
# chmod +x *.sh
Start jBilling Installation
To start jbilling, execute the 'startup.sh' script and you will be surprised to the following lines of successfully startup of Tomcat service.
# ./startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /root/jbilling-community-4.1.1
Using CATALINA_HOME: /root/jbilling-community-4.1.1
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /root/jbilling-community-4.1.1/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-8-jre
Using CLASSPATH: /root/jbilling-community-4.1.1/bin/bootstrap.jar:/root/jbilling-community-4.1.1/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started.
jBilling Web Access:
JBilling installation setup has been done your Ubuntu 15.10 server now open your web browser and access the below local host URL and signup for a new user.
http://localhost:8080/jbilling/signup
Now login to your jbilling account using the credentials you have got in your mailbox.
To configure your mail server and other SMTP setting, open the 'jbilling.properties' file located under the mentioned path in the command below.
kashif@ubuntu-15:~/jbilling_install/jbilling$vim jbilling.properties
Change the settings according to your own mail server setup and then save the file.
If you are working on localhost then you can reset your password by getting the email from the following location in your server where all localhost emails arrived.
Open the file below and copy the link address from here.
kashif@ubuntu-15:~/jbilling_install/jbilling/resources$ vim emails_sent.txt
Copy this link and open in your web browser by replacing http://yourcompany.com with http://localhost:8080 follwed by the URL. Then configure your new password and login using your newly created account as shown.
jBilling Dashboard
After acceptance of your login credentials your will be directed towards its awesome billing dashboard where you can see a number of its available options including Customers, agents, Invoice, Payments and Orders etc as shown below.
Simply click on the option available in the tabs and start using your own billing system, if you want configure your jbilling system then click on the configuration button and configure your own required settings.
Conclusion
At the end of this article, you are now able to install and configure your own billing system without any cost by using the jBilling system. The jBilling system source is freely available for the multiple operating systems but using it on Ubuntu has its own taste, stability and high performance level, while the installation steps are also much easy to perform. so, we hope you really enjoyed while reading this article find this much helpful while on the way to start using jBilling on Linux.
The post How to Setup jBilling a Billing Solution On Ubuntu 15.10 appeared first on LinOxide.