jruff's picture

When selecting the create PDF option, it switches to an empty webpage and nothing happens. I have tried running SI as a virtual machine on both Proxmox-VE and VirtualBox. Does anybody know why this has stopped working?

 

Thanks,

John

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Unfortunately, it may be the end of the line for "SimpleInvoices"... :(

It appears to be abandonware... So it looks like we'll completely deprecate the appliance and that's pretty much the end of it... With the death now of bot BambooInvoice and SimpleInvoices, I guess we'll need to look for some alternate software to fill the gap. InvoiceNinja looks like a good option?!

Anyway, regarding SimpleInvoices, there hasn't been an official release since 2013 and the website seems thoroughly broken. There was a guy that was at least maintaining the code for the last few years. But it appears that he's dropped off the radar as there hasn't been commit for well over a year now.

I've just been having a read through some of the issues, and it appears that it may not be completely compatible with PHP 7.x (which obviously slipped through our release testing). Note that no versions of PHP prior to 7.2 are supported by upstream (see PHP versions supported by PHP developers).

Debian still do provide limited security support for older versions of PHP that are installed via the Debian apt repositories, but you need to be using an older version of TurnKey (or Debian) to have access to those. FWIW, the current v15.x appliances includes PHP 7.0, the previous generation (v14.x) included PHP 5.6 (and the upcoming v16.x release will include PHP 7.3).

TBH, I'm not sure whether it's PHP version incompatibility that's the cause of the issue you're experiencing, but it could be? It could also be a missing dependency (SimpleInvoices isn't one of our heavily used appliances; so it's not impossible that no one has reported the issue). Or there have been a few other appliances that required a specific version of a dependency to write PDF files properly. Perhaps SimpleInvoices is another of those? Although there are a few different libraries that do that, so I'm not even sure which one SimpleInvoices uses?!

A workaround may be to leverage the web browser to "print to PDF" (e.g. I know that Google Chrome has that functionality). It may not give you quite as nice a result, but perhaps it's enough for your needs?

Finally, now that you have bought this to my attention, I have disabled the SimpleInvoices page so no new users inadvertantly download it. There are still images on the mirror though if you wish to download them. Perhaps it's worth trying to old v14.2 SimpleInvoices ISO? We only provide "best effort" support for our old images and I certainly wouldn't recommend running it publicly on the internet. But for your own personal usage within your LAN should be fine...

Sorry that I don't have better news... :(

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