Fat Free CRM is next generation open source CRM platform. Active development has started in November 2008; new features, enhancements, and updates appear on daily basis.

Here are the steps to get Fat Free CRM up and running on your system.

• Ruby v1.8.6 or later

• Ruby on Rails v2.2 (hasn’t been ported to Rails 2.3 yet)

• MySQL v4.1.1 or later (v5+ is recommended) or SQLite v3.4 or later

• Browsers: FireFox and Safari (IE is not supported yet)

• Project page: github.com/michaeldv/fat_free_crm/tree/master

• Git repository: git:https://github.com/michaeldv/fat_free_crm.git

• Lighthouse: fatfreecrm.lighthouseapp.com

• Twitter: twitter.com/fatfreecrm

Fat Free CRM supports MySQL and SQLite databases. The source code comes with two sample database configuration files: config/database.mysql.yml for MySQL and config/database.sqlite.yml for SQLite. Based on your choice of the database create the actual database configuration file, for example:

$ cp config/database.mysql.yml config/database.yml

Edit config/database.yml and specify database names and authentication details. Once you have database configuration file ready run rake to create the database:

$ rake db:create

The next step is to load default Fat Free CRM settings, such as menu structure, default colors, etc. This is done by running the following rake task:

$ rake crm:setup

You can test drive Fat Free CRM by loading sample records that are generated on the fly mimic the actual use:

$ rake crm:demo:load

Among other things the demo generator creates 8 sample user records with the following usernames: aaron, ben, cindy, dan, emily, frank, george, and heather. You can login with any of these names using the name as password.

You can reset the database and reload demo data at any time by using:

$ rake crm:demo:reload

Now you should be able to launch the Rails server and point your web browser to localhost:3000

$ ./script/server

Fat Free CRM can be customized by trapping callback hooks and extended by adding plugins. Please see github.com/michaeldv/crm_sample_plugin/tree/master and github.com/michaeldv/crm_web_to_lead/tree/master for sample source code demonstrating the concepts.

Copyright © 2008-2009 by Michael Dvorkin. All rights reserved.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See LICENSE file for more details.