How to Configure Sentrifugo: An Open-Source Human Management System on CentOS

Sentrifugo is a free and open-source human resource management system that is powerful enough to meet your organizational needs. Sentrifugo helps you to manage and track your employees' availability and helps you to maintain privileges and roles for various employee groups in your organization. It also comes with a CV management feature that allows you to schedule interviews conveniently.

In this tutorial, we will be installing Sentrifugo on a Linux server with CentOS 7 installed on it.

Prerequisites

1. You must have Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) activated and verified your valid payment method. If you are a new user, you can get a free account in your Alibaba Cloud account. Your ECS instance must have at least 1GB RAM and 1 Core processor.
2. A domain name registered from Alibaba Cloud. If you have already registered a domain from Alibaba Cloud or any other host, you can update its domain nameserver records.
3. The domain name must be pointed to your Alibaba Cloud ECS's IP address
4. Access to VNC console in your Alibaba Cloud or SSH client installed on your PC
5. Set up your server's hostname and create a user with root privileges.

Update Your CentOS 7 System

Before proceeding with the installation of any kind of package, use the following command to update your CentOS system. To execute this command, remember to login from non-root user with sudo privileges.

# sudo yum -y update

You will be prompted to enter your password. Now type your password and hit Enter and wait for the update.

Install Unzip

To unzip any zip folder, you will need an unzip tool. To do so, use the following command:

# sudo yum -y install unzip

Install Nano Editor

You can edit any file easily using Nano editor due to its ease of use. To install Nano editor, execute the command below:

# sudo yum install nano    

You will be asked "Is this ok?" To proceed with the installation, type 'y' and hit Enter.

Install epel-release:

To install  epel-release, execute the command below:

# sudo yum install epel-release

You will be asked, "Is this ok?" To proceed with the installation, type 'y' and hit Enter.

Enable remi repo and Install yum-utils

PHP 5.6 is required by Sentrifugo. It is not available in the yum repository, so you will have to enable remi repository for PHP 5.6. To do so, execute the following commands.

# sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm 
# sudo yum -y install yum-utils
# sudo yum-config-manager --enable remi-php56

Install Apache

You will be required to install the Apache server. To install it, execute the command below.

# sudo yum -y install httpd

Install PHP 5.6

To install PHP 5.6 on CentOS, along with modules required by Sentrifugo, execute the following command:

# sudo yum -y install php php-gd php-mysqli php-mbstring php-curl php-cli php-pear php-devel php-openssl

Install MariaDB (MySQL) Server

In replacement of MySQL server, CentOS uses MariaDB server by default. To install MariaDB, use the following command:

# sudo yum -y install mariadb-server

For enterprise applications, Alibaba Cloud Aspara DB for RDS is a good alternative, and its use is recommended. Alibaba Cloud AsparaDB for RDS frees you from managing a database, helping you to focus on your business. It provides protection against SQL injections, network attacks, brute force attacks and many other types of database attacks. It is highly scalable, available and secure.

After successful installation, enable the MariaDB server to start automatically when system reboot. To do so, use the following commands:

# sudo systemctl enable mariadb

To start MariaDB server, execute the command below:

# sudo systemctl start mariadb

Now to secure your MariaDB server, execute the command:

# sudo mysql_secure_installation

The root password will be blank by default; just hit Enter to proceed and select 'Y' and choose your password.

Configure Database

To login to your MySQL server, execute the following command and login to shell.

# mysql -u root -p

Execute the following MySQL query to create a database, add a new user, and assign the database to the newly created user.

CREATE DATABASE hrm CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
CREATE USER 'hrm'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '654321Ab';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON hrm.* TO 'hrm'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Sentrifugo Human Resource Management

To install Sentrifugo, you will require to download the compressed folder of Sentrifugo installation. To do so, follow the steps below.

Step 1:

Download Sentrifugo ZIP folder by executing the command below.

# wget http://www.sentrifugo.com/home/downloadfile?file_name=Sentrifugo.zip -O Sentrifugo.zip

Step 2:

You can confirm if the folder was downloaded successfully by executing the command below.

# ls -li

Step 3:

Extract the files from the zipped folder by using the command. In my case, the folder name is Sentrifugo.zip.

# sudo unzip Sentrifugo.zip -d /var/www

Step 4:

Navigate to directory /var/www

# cd /var/www

Step 5:

Assign rights of this folder to apache. To do so, execute the following command.

# sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/Sentrifugo_3.2

Step 6:

Now create a virtual host for your Sentrifugo. The following command will open a file in nano editor.

# sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/softpedia.xyz.conf

Step 7:

Add the following lines to an opened text file and save it. Remember to update server name according to your IP address or domain name.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName softpedia.xyz
    DocumentRoot /var/www/Sentrifugo_3.2
    <Directory /var/www/Sentrifugo_3.2>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Step 8:

Now, restart your Apache server to load settings by executing the following command.

# sudo systemctl restart httpd

Step 9:

Now, you can access Sentrifugo via your ECS IP address or domain name. I accessed via domain. The following screen loaded after accessing.

Step 10:

Now click Next. You will be redirected to the database settings page as shown below. Here, you will add your database details.

Step 11:

After confirmation of database information, you will be redirected to the application settings page.

Step 12:

After confirmation of application settings, you will be redirected to mail server settings.

After completing SMTP settings, you will see the final check page. Make sure the details are correct and click Confirm.

Congratulations! Sentrifugo is now ready to use on your VPS server.