Requirements

Tidemark Billing needs PHP 8.3 or newer, a handful of common PHP extensions, one supported database, and a few writable folders. The installer checks most of this for you before it lets you continue.

PHP and extensions#

PHP 8.3 or newer is required. The installer page checks for these extensions, and refuses to continue until they are all present:

mbstring, openssl, pdo, fileinfo, ctype, tokenizer, xml, curl, json and bcmath.

You also need one database driver: pdo_sqlite, pdo_mysql or pdo_pgsql.

Two more extensions matter for specific features and are not part of the installer check:

• zip, for uploading plugins from the admin area.
• sodium, for the License Server plugin. intl is recommended for currency formatting.

Database#

You can choose one of these in the installer:

• SQLite: needs no setup. The data lives in database/database.sqlite. The installer describes it as fine for most small businesses.
• MySQL / MariaDB: enter host, port, database name, username and password.
• PostgreSQL: available when pdo_pgsql is loaded.

Folders that must be writable#

The installer checks these three:

• storage/
• bootstrap/cache/
• .env, or the application folder itself if .env does not exist yet (the app creates it from .env.example on first run)

On shared hosting, chmod 775 on the folders is the fix the installer suggests.

Web server#

Point the domain's document root at the public/ folder. If your host does not let you, the zip includes a root .htaccess that forwards requests to public/ and blocks access to application folders. That fallback relies on Apache with mod_rewrite.

Docker#

The Docker image already contains PHP and every extension it needs, and you only need Docker. It listens on port 8080 inside the container.

Related#

• Install on shared hosting
• Install with Docker
• Troubleshooting