How to install Easy!Appointments on Raspberry PI: Open Source Reservation Tool

Posted on 21st August 202321st August 2023 by peppe8o

Last Updated on 21st August 2023 by peppe8o

This tutorial will show you how to install and configure Easy!Appointments on Raspberry PI, to create a self-hosted and open-source customer reservations management tool with no headaches.

Table of Contents

What is Easy!Appointments

Easy!Appointments is an open-source software that allows managing reservations with a very low effort. It enables you to easily handle appointments, bookings, and schedules, making it ideal for small businesses and organizations.

The main feature of Easy!Appointments development is simplicity: both the frontend (where customers book a service for a specified time) and the backend (where administrators manage services) are really simple to understand and use.

Exposing Easy!Appointments with Raspberry PI to Internet

In order to make the service available to the web, you will need an internet connection with a public IP (better if the IP is also static). In this way, you should buy a domain or use the free No-IP with Raspberry PI. This will enable to to provide your customers with a mnemonic address instead of an IP address.

Moreover, you may also opt to install Let’s Encrypt and Certbot on Raspberry PI in order to make your connection secure with a HTTPS connection instead of the HTTP and avoid browser warnings.

In this tutorial, I will use Easy!Appointments with my Raspberry PI Zero 2 W and a private IP in order to test the installation steps.

What We Need

As usual, I suggest adding from now to your favourite e-commerce shopping cart all the needed hardware, so that at the end you will be able to evaluate overall costs and decide if continue with the project or remove them from the shopping cart. So, hardware will be only:

Raspberry PI Computer Board (including proper power supply or using a smartphone micro USB charger with at least 3A)
high speed micro SD card (at least 16 GB, at least class 10)

Step-by-Step Procedure

Prepare Raspberry PI OS Lite

Please start installing your favourite Operating System for Raspberry PI (must be Debian-based). I suggest using Raspberry PI OS Lite, as it provides a headless, faster environment also for low capabilities Raspberry PI computer boards. But you can also use Raspberry PI OS Desktop, in this case working from its internal terminal. You can check the difference between the two OS from my Raspberry PI OS Lite vs Desktop: comparison between the 2 distributions.

Make your OS up-to-date. From terminal, please use the following command:

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install LAMP Packages

We also need to install all the packages to transform our Raspberry PI into a Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php (LAMP) server. We’ll use MariaDB instead of MySQL as it performs better in our Raspberry PI. You can check all the required steps detailed in my LAMP server on Raspberry PI tutorial. These steps can be resumed with the following apt line:

sudo apt install apache2 php mariadb-server php-mysql -y

You should also secure your MariaDB installation with the following command:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

This will ask you some questions, better explained in the referred LAMP tutorial. This also includes the Phpmyadmin installation. It isn’t required but you can also install it to get a web tool to visually manage your database.

We also need the php_curl extension in order to be able to sync with Google Calendar. We can get it easily by running the following terminal command:

sudo apt install php-curl

Finally, we can remove the default Apache Index page:

sudo rm /var/www/html/index.html

Prepare The Database

We must prepare a database and user for our Easy!Appointments installation.

Log into MariaDB shell as root:

sudo mariadb -u root

Create a database for Easy!Appointments (I called it “EADB”, but you can name it as you prefer):

create database EADB;

grant all privileges of Easy!Appointments database to the user (with password) that you will configure in Easy!Appointments in the next steps. Please use your favourite database name, DB user and DB password instead of red ones (respectively EADB, EAuser and EApassword):

grant all privileges on EADB.* to EAuser@localhost identified by 'EApassword';

Flush the privileges table for the changes to take effect and then exit

flush privileges;
exit;

Get Easy!Appointments source files

We have now to download the latest Easy!Appointments files. This can be achieved by checking the link available at the Easy!Appointments home page (scrolling the page down a bit):

If you click it with the right button of your mouse, you can just use the “Copy link address” option to copy the path and use it in your Raspberry PI terminal with the wget command. It should result in a command like the following:

wget https://github.com/alextselegidis/easyappointments/releases/download/1.5.0-dev.4/easyappointments-1.5.0-dev.4.zip

Now, please create a folder that will include all the Easy!Appointments files in your Apache “www” folder and use the unzip command to extract the package directly there (please remember to change your filename if your version is different):

sudo mkdir /var/www/easyappointments
sudo unzip easyappointments-1.5.0-dev.4.zip -d /var/www/easyappointments/

Finally, grant the proper permissions to the folder:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/easyappointments/

Edit the config.php File

Some settings must be configured at the very first run in order to get our Easy!Appointments installation working on Raspberry PI. Please make a copy of the config-sample (named “config.php”), assign the permissions and edit it with the following 3 command lines:

sudo cp /var/www/easyappointments/config-sample.php /var/www/easyappointments/config.php
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/easyappointments/config.php
sudo nano /var/www/easyappointments/config.php

Inside the GENERAL SETTINGS section, we’ll find the following:

    const BASE_URL      = 'http://url-to-easyappointments-directory';
    const LANGUAGE      = 'english';
    const DEBUG_MODE    = FALSE;

Please change the “BASE_URL” variable to your one. If you have a domain, you can insert it here. Otherwise, for local installation maybe for testing purposes, you can use the Raspberry PI’s IP Address. In my case, with my RPI’s IP Address equal to 192.168.137.184:

    const BASE_URL      = 'http://192.168.137.184';

The following DATABASE SETTINGS section available from the same file will allow you to add the database name and credentials set in the previous steps. For my example values, it will be:

    const DB_HOST       = 'localhost';
    const DB_NAME       = 'EADB';
    const DB_USERNAME   = 'EAuser';
    const DB_PASSWORD   = 'EApassword';

The DB_HOST will remain to localhost unless you use a remote database instance (this isn’t our case, you can leave it as is).

Save and close the file.

Change the Apache DocumentRoot

In order to make Apache aware that there is a new web directory, we must configure it to point the document root to our easyappointments folder. To make it, please open the Apache default

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Please identify the DocumentRoot variable, that should be as default:

DocumentRoot /var/www/html

And change it to point to our easyappointments folder:

DocumentRoot /var/www/easyappointments

In order to make the change running, please restart the Apache service:

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Test Easy!Appointments Connection

Now, we can go to our favourite browser in order to check if everything is working, by using your Raspberry PI’s IP address as URL (in my case, “http://192.168.137.184”).

At the date of this tutorial, there’s a mismatch between the minimal PHP version required by the latest Easy!Appointments version (8.0.2) and the PHP version installed by default from apt (7.4). This will be immediately visible to you if you get the following browser error:

Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version ">= 8.0.2".

If you don’t have this issue, you can move to the next chapter.

We can fix this problem by using the “sury” packages. I’m not going to deep into the following steps for the sake of simplicity, but the following command lines will add a new public key in order to use a new package repository in your Raspberry PI and will let you install a newer PHP version, with all the most common extensions. These commands will help you to switch from php7.4 to php8.2:

sudo wget -qO /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg

echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y php8.2-common php8.2-cli php8.2-curl php8.2-gd php8.2-mbstring php8.2-xml php8.2-zip php8.2-mysql libapache2-mod-php8.2 -y

sudo a2dismod php7.4

sudo a2enmod php8.2

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Starting the Installation Wizard for Easy!Appointments on Raspberry PI

If you fixed the PHP version, you must perform a browser refresh, otherwise (if you didn’t get the PHP error) you should find the following page:

Please fill out the form with your favourite credentials and scroll down to click the “INSTALL EASY!APPOINTMENTS” button. It will take a few seconds to complete the installation and redirect you to your calendar:

You are now ready to use the Easy!Appointments with Raspberry PI.

Please remember that there are 2 main addresses to know:

http://YourAddress/index.php/login: will show the login page to access the backend, where you manage your users, services and reservations
http://YourAddress: will show the frontend, where customers will access for reserving a service

Create a New Provider

By default, Easy!Appointments creates one demo “Provider” user named “Jane Doe”. A provider is a person that will be shown as available for customers for reservations.

You can manage providers (as well as Admins and Secretaries) from the Users menu:

On the resulting page, you can create a new user (or edit/delete existing ones) with the menu shown on top:

Please use the “ADD” button to create a new provider. Before saving it, please remember to assign the default Service to the created user:

Switching to the frontend, in this way your customer will be able to select the new Provider from the booking form:

And the provider will see the new reservation in its calendar, after logging in:

Easy!Appointments Support

The team that maintains Easy!Appointments has created a support page available at https://groups.google.com/g/easy-appointments for any support request.

What’s Next

Interested in more cool projects for your Raspberry PI computer board? Take a look at peppe8o Raspberry PI tutorials.

Enjoy Easy!Appointments on Raspberry PI!