How to Install Snipe-IT on Ubuntu 16.04

Introduction

In the IT industry, asset management is the process of tracking assets throughout their entire life cycle, including acquisition, maintenance, storage, and disposal. Although the specific assets vary, the focus is generally on individual pieces of hardware or software, licenses, and file-based resources, like digital artwork.

Snipe-IT — a free and open-source application designed specifically for IT asset management — provides a web-based interface for tracking licenses, accessories, consumables, and components. Snipe-IT includes user-based accounts with configurable group-level permissions, customizable reporting capabilities, and a JSON REST API for connecting to, managing, and extending Snipe-IT from the command line or third-party applications.

In this tutorial, you will download, install, and configure Snipe-IT and then you will create an admin user account to log into Snipe-IT for the first time.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need:

• One Ubuntu 16.04 server set up by following this Ubuntu 16.04 initial server setup tutorial, including a sudo non-root user and a firewall.
• The LEMP stack configured by following this LEMP installation guide.
• The following DNS records set up for your server. You can follow this hostname tutorial for details on how to add them.
  • An A record with example.com pointing to your server’s public IP address.
  • An A record with www.example.com pointing to your server’s public IP address.
• Nginx secured with an SSL certificate by following this setting up Let’s Encrypt with Nginx server blocks on Ubuntu 16.04 tutorial. Be sure to choose option 2, Redirect, in Step 4 of the Nginx setup tutorial, as this will provide automatic redirects to HTTPS on your Snipe-IT installation.

Step 1 — Preparing the Server

Before downloading Snipe-IT, prepare the server by installing some additional PHP libraries and creating the MySQL database and database user Snipe-IT will use to store its data.

Snipe-IT is built on the Laravel PHP framework and, thus, requires the Composer dependency manager for the installation and management of additional PHP libraries.

Use apt-get to install composer and unzip, a utility that’s needed to extract files from Zip archives.

sudo apt-get install composer unzip

Next, install the additional PHP modules that Snipe-IT relies on.

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mbstring php7.0-xml php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-gd php7.0-zip php7.0-curl php7.0-bcmath

The extra packages provide PHP with:

• php7.0-mbstring - the Multibyte String module for handling languages that can’t be expressed in 256 characters
• php7.0-xml - the DOM module for working with XML documents through the document object model (DOM) API, the SimpleXML module for converting XML to an object that you can manipulate with property selectors and array iterators, the WDDX module for exchanging data in the Web Distributed Data Exchange (WDDX) format, the XML Parser module for parsing XML documents, and the XSL module for performing XSLT transformations
• php7.0-mcrypt - the Mcrypt module for working with block cipher algorithms
• php7.0-gd - the GD module for image processing
• php7.0-zip - the Zip module for manipulating Zip-compressed archives
• php7.0-curl - the Client URL Library module for connecting to and communicating with servers over a variety of protocols
• php7.0-bcmath - the BCMath Arbitrary Precision Mathematics module for working with numbers of any size and precision up to 2147483647 decimals

Now, use the command-line mysql utility to log into MySQL as your root database user.

mysql -u root -p

Create a new MySQL user named snipeit on the localhost, 127.0.0.1, and assign the user a password.

create user snipeit@127.0.0.1 identified by 'snipeit_user_password';

Next, create a database named snipeitdb where Snipe-IT will store its data.

create database snipeitdb;

Grant all privileges on all tables in the snipeitdb database to the snipeit user, so that Snipe-IT has permission to perform any action it needs on the database.

grant all on snipeitdb.* to snipeit@127.0.0.1;

Finally, activate the changes by reloading the grant tables with the flush privileges command and exit the utility.

flush privileges;
exit;

Your server now has the additional PHP libraries and MySQL database that Snipe-IT needs to function properly, so let’s download and configure Snipe-IT itself.

Step 2 — Downloading and Configuring Snipe-IT

Per the official installation instructions, you’ll use Git to download the latest version of Snipe-IT. Since Git only clones into existing directories if they’re empty, use ls to view the contents of the directory you configured for Snipe-IT’s Nginx server block in the Prerequisites.

ls /var/www/example.com/html/

If the directory isn’t empty, use basic Linux navigation and file management commands to clear it out now. mv moves the contents to a different location, and rm deletes them altogether.

Once the directory is empty, download Snipe-IT from its official repository on GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/snipe/snipe-it /var/www/example.com/html/

The output confirms the location you’re cloning into and then provides a real-time report of the process, including a count of the objects Git expected to copy as well as the number it actually did copy.

Output from git clone
Cloning into '/var/www/example.com/html/'...
remote: Counting objects: 70975, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (62/62), done.
remote: Total 70975 (delta 20), reused 37 (delta 15), pack-reused 70897
Receiving objects: 100% (70975/70975), 67.04 MiB | 14.35 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (44264/44264), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

You now have a complete copy of Snipe-IT, but before you begin installation, you need to enable Nginx to access the storage, public/uploads, and bootstrap/cache directories, as this is where Snipe-IT writes its caches, logs, and uploaded files.

Change to the installation directory.

cd /var/www/example.com/html/

Use chown with the -R option to recursively change the user and group ownership to www-data — Nginx’s user and group — on all three directories.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data storage
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data public/uploads
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data bootstrap/cache

Then, use chmod with the -R flag to recursively set permissions on these directories, making them read-, write-, and executable by their owner, read- and executable by their group, and read- and executable by the world.

sudo chmod -R 755 storage
sudo chmod -R 755 public/uploads
sudo chmod -R 755 bootstrap/cache

With the file and directory permissions correctly set for Nginx, you’re ready to run composer install, which reads the list of additional dependencies in Snipe-IT’s composer.json file and then resolves and installs them into /var/www/example.com/html/vendor.

The --no-dev option tells composer to ignore dependencies that are not necessary for running Snipe-IT but are useful when doing development on Snipe-IT.

The --prefer-source option tells composer to download the dependencies from their version control repositories, if they exist.

composer install --no-dev --prefer-source

The output reports each dependency that composer attempts to install, indicates whether the dependency was successfully cloned, and finishes by creating optimized autoload files which improve the performance of class loading in Composer-backed PHP applications.

Output from composer install --no-dev --prefer-source
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies from lock file
  - Installing symfony/finder (v3.3.10)
    Cloning 773e19a491d97926f236942484cb541560ce862d
...
Generating optimized autoload files

You can now begin configuring your installation. Start by making a copy of the .env.example file that ships with Snipe-IT; this is where Snipe-IT stores environment variables and settings like timezone, base URL, and log size. Then, open .env for editing.

cp .env.example .env
nano .env

Look for the following:

# --------------------------------------------
# REQUIRED: BASIC APP SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------
...
APP_URL=null
...

APP_URL tells Snipe-IT the base URL for your installation. Replace null with your domain name.

# --------------------------------------------
# REQUIRED: BASIC APP SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------
...
APP_URL=https://example.com
...

Next, find the following lines:

...
# --------------------------------------------
# REQUIRED: DATABASE SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_DATABASE=null
DB_USERNAME=null
DB_PASSWORD=null
DB_PREFIX=null
DB_DUMP_PATH='/usr/bin'
DB_CHARSET=utf8mb4
DB_COLLATION=utf8mb4_unicode_ci
...

This is where you tell Snipe-IT how to connect to the MySQL database you created in Step 1.

Because Snipe-IT is configured by default to connect to a MySQL database running on the localhost, you don’t need to modify the first two lines.

Replace DB_DATABASE and DB_USERNAME with the name of the MySQL database and database user you created in Step 1, and replace DB_PASSWORD with the password you assigned that database user.

DB_PREFIX adds custom prefixes to the table names in Snipe-IT’s database. This setting is not required but may stop some automated attacks that rely on default database tables names. Leave this set to the default null value unless you want to add a custom prefix.

# --------------------------------------------
# REQUIRED: DATABASE SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_DATABASE=snipeitdb
DB_USERNAME=snipeit
DB_PASSWORD=snipeit_user_password
DB_PREFIX=null

Close and save the file.

Now, use artisan migrate to populate MySQL with Snipe-IT’s default database schema. This command will tell Laravel to perform a database migration using the files found in /var/www/example.com/html/database/migrations/.

sudo php artisan migrate

When prompted, enter yes to confirm that you want to perform the migration.

The output reports the name of each migration it completes in real time.

Output from php artisan migrate
**************************************
*     Application In Production!     *
**************************************

 Do you really wish to run this command? (yes/no) [no]:
 > yes
 
 Migration table created successfully.
 ...
 Migrated:  2017_11_08_123942_labels_display_company_name

Finally, use artisan key:generate to create an application key for your installation. Laravel will write the key’s value to the APP_KEY line in the .env file, and Snipe-IT will use the key when encrypting and decrypting data like session tokens.

php artisan key:generate

Once again, when prompted, enter yes to confirm that you want to generate the application key.

When finished, the output will show you the key that was generated and tell you that the value was written to the .env file.

Output from php artisan key:generate
**************************************
*     Application In Production!     *
**************************************

 Do you really wish to run this command? (yes/no) [no]:
 > yes

Application key [base64:rxP+jS3Q8qtM9eBktXtS/zqrrXVY1LEMxoZkbV35Al0=] set successfully.

With installation and configuration complete, it’s time to modify Nginx to serve Snipe-IT.

Step 3 — Configuring Nginx

Before you can bring Snipe-IT up in your web browser, you first need to point Nginx to Snipe-IT’s root web application directory, and you need to redirect incoming requests to Snipe-IT’s request handler.

Start by opening the configuration file you created for Snipe-IT’s Nginx server block.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Look for the directive that sets the server block’s root directory.

server {
    ...
    root /var/www/example.com/html;
    ...
}

Snipe-IT’s web application files are located in the public directory that was automatically created when you cloned the project from GitHub. Modify Nginx to use public as this server block’s root directory.

server {
    ...
    root /var/www/example.com/html/public;
    ...
}

Next, find the default location block:

server {
    ...
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
    ...
}

Modify this block to pass all requests to Snipe-IT’s request handler for processing.

server {
    ...
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
    }
    ...
}

Save and close the file.

Before restarting Nginx, test your new configuration.

sudo nginx -t

The output should report that your syntax is ok. If it doesn’t, follow the on-screen messages for additional help.

Now, restart Nginx to apply the changes.

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Finally, verify that Nginx is back up and running.

sudo systemctl status nginx

The output should indicate that the service is active (running). If it doesn’t, retrace the previous steps to resolve the problem before continuing

Now that Nginx is fully configured, log into Snipe-IT’s web setup utility to complete the installation.

Step 4 — Setting up Snipe-IT with the Pre-Flight Utility

To finish the installation, point your web browser to https://example.com. This will take you to Step 1 of Snipe-IT’s Pre-Flight Utility, where Snipe-IT will do a quick test of your installation to make sure that everything is correctly configured.

On this screen, you’ll see a table showing you each setting that Pre-Flight tested, the setting’s test result, and a short note describing the setting. A green checkmark in the Valid column indicates the setting was correct. If any setting is highlighted in pink and marked with a red X in the Valid column, that indicates there’s a problem with that setting. Follow Snipe-IT’s instructions for resolving the problem before continuing.

As we haven’t configured Snipe-IT for email, you can click the blue Next: Create Database Tables button in the bottom, right-hand corner of the screen to continue the installation now.

In Step 2 of Pre-Flight, Snipe-IT checks your database and performs a migration if necessary. Since you already did a manual database migration with artisan in Step 3 of this tutorial, Pre-Flight will tell you that the database is already set up and that there is Nothing to migrate.

Press the blue Next: Create User button in the bottom, right-hand corner of the screen.

In Step 3 of Pre-Flight, Snipe-IT asks you to enter some general application settings and create your first administrative user account.

In the Site Name field, enter the label you want Snipe-IT to display at the top of every screen. This could be your company’s name or it could even be something more descriptive like, Sammy’s Asset Management.

In the Email Domain field, enter the domain you want Snipe-IT to use for outgoing mail, and in the Email Format field, select the way you want Snipe-IT to format the To: header in outgoing messages.

Enter your name in the First Name and Last Name fields and your email address in the Email field.

Finally, enter the username you’d like associated with your account in the Username field, and enter the password you’d like to use in the Password field. Be sure to enter the same password in the Confirm Password field and make a note of your credentials before continuing. You’ll need them both to log into Snipe-IT.

Because you’re creating this account for yourself, you can leave Email my credentials to the email address above unchecked.

Click the blue Next: Save User button in the bottom, right-hand corner of the screen once you’ve filled out all of the information.

In Step 4 of Pre-Flight, Snipe-IT saves the general application settings you just entered, creates the new administrative user, and logs you into the main dashboard.

At this point, your installation is complete and you can start using Snipe-IT to manage your or your clients’ IT assets.

Conclusion

In this article you set up the LEMP stack, secured Nginx with a Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificate, installed and configured Snipe-IT, created an administrative user account, and logged into the main Snipe-IT dashboard.

To learn about adding and editing assets to Snipe-IT, see the official guide to managing assets.

To learn about working with user accounts in Snipe-IT, see the official documentation on managing users.

Or, for other questions, check out the official Snipe-IT User’s Manual.