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BLAdmin - Wed, 2026/01/28 - 05:54
Hello All,
I'm a new user here and was looking for a maintained version of SuiteCRM. Looking to demo it to my bosses so we can get off the old paper systems.
I'm new to TurnKey but had been using Bitnami until late for similar maintained apps.
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Hi there.
Unfortunately all of our appliances are getting a bit "long in the tooth" as they say so I can't help you with an up to date version (latest SuiteCRM release is v8.9 - our appliance still only ha v8.4). Although perhaps our current one is good enough for your current purposes? Alternatively updating SuiteCRM within our appliance shouldn't be too hard.
FYI our appliances are based on Debian and where possible we use the default software provided by Debian - albeit with some config hardening and some custom software. So unlike Bitnami, the only custom TurnKey commands/software provide additional value or ease of use. So for general usage very little TurnKey specific knowledge is required. Changes that you may wish to make will (generally) be consistent with "vanilla" Debian (Ubuntu docs are usually "near enough" too - as that is also based on Debian).
The only specific knowledge you should need to get SuiteCRM up and running are noted on the TurnKey SuiteCRM appliance page. Then you can use the SuiteCRM upgrade docs. Everything should continue to "just work" - except with a newer SuiteCRM version. Note that some of the core "built-in" software versions (e.g. PHP) will be a bit old, but Debian provide security updates for another few years and I double checked the SuiteCRM requirements and our current server fulfills them.
Please let me know if you have any problems or further questions and I'll get back to you ASAP (albeit a little slow here sometimes). Ideally open a new thread on the forums - although I'll see a reply here too if need be.
Alternatively, if you start a free trial of our "TurnKey Hub" service you can access our "paid" support there (available when subscribed to a paid plan - even during the free trial period).
Regardless I do hope to push updated appliances ASAP - including a rebuilt and updated SuiteCRM appliance. However as a community driven project, we don't have the resources that Bitnami do so I don't have an ETA.
BLAdmin's response
BLAdmin replied via email and it should have been auto posted as a comment/response. But for some reason it didn't. So I'm manually copy pasting the content here. I figured that while I was at it I might as well move it to a new support thread.
I'm no SuiteCRM expert.
I'm no SuiteCRM expert - my knowledge tends to be generic and broad rather that application specific. Although I'm intimately familiar with TurnKey and having said that disclaimer in my experience many/most apps tend to broadly work in similar ways.
With that context out of the way, I'll respond to your points.
They may well be moving to an angular/js heavy build, but angular is a front end library, so it doesn't exclude use of PHP server side. I can't speak to the specifics of SuiteCRM, but I suspect that they are offloading lots of the functionality to the (angular/js) front end and probably more cleanly separating the front and back ends. I strongly suspect that the model they are shifting to is using their existing restful API to communicate between the js frontend (that runs in the user's browser) and the PHP backend.
Re contributions - they're always welcome! :) Whatever you are willing and able to contribute is always welcome. FWIW the SuiteCRM build code is hosted on GitHub - the shared code (e.g. general Apache, PHP and MariaDB config and setup) is within our "common" repository. Suggestions/feature requests/bug reports etc can go on on consolidated "issue tracker" (also on GitHub).
Re the domain, if you are using it in-house there are a few workarounds. You could give the server a static IP and then either add a domain to your local PC hosts file (pointing to the server IP) or just use the IP as the "domain". To update the domain, rerunning the firstboot script should do the job:
Re the issues you had with the log in breakage, my suspicion is the mod_evasive Apache module (essentially a WAF). To test my theory try just disabling it:
Re the archive servers, we use the URL recommended by Debian - i.e. 'deb'debian.org' which should auto redirect to the closest CDN. So the issue was likely a temporary issue with the CDN that it redirected to. I'm in Australia and occasionally (although very rarely) the CDN gets out of sync and can cause issues - as you note using a specific mirror URL usually resolves that. The other possibility is that if you have some sort of proxy between you and the internet perhaps the traffic was being mangled a bit? Regardless, glad to hear that you worked that out.
Re the subdomain - it sounds like I may have misunderstood your earlier mention of that? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding it now?! :)
Anyway as I noted above, updating the "domain" for an existing SuiteCRM instance should be pretty straight forward. If the above doesn't "just work" please let me know and we can try to work out why. If the lack of a static IP is the core problem - and setting a static IP isn't an option - then the only thing I can think of is setting up a dynamic DNS client. Exactly how you would do that (or if it's even possible) will depend on your DNS provider. I forget the name of it but there is a "swiss army knife" type DDNS client in the Debian apt repos and IIRC it's fairly well documented and has instructions for the most common DNS providers.
I hope that's of some use...
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