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Self-Hosted on Your Own Server

Running ChurchCRM on a server you control — a VPS, a cloud instance, or hardware in your building — gives you full control over configuration, updates, backups, and data. It usually costs less than shared hosting and performs better, but it assumes someone on your team is comfortable with the Linux command line.

If your host offers cPanel, the one-click Softaculous install or the manual cPanel install are simpler starting points.

Before you start​

  • Confirm your server meets the system requirements — PHP 8.4+, MySQL 8.0+ / MariaDB 10.5+, Apache or nginx with URL rewriting, and about 500 MB of disk to start.
  • Have a domain or subdomain pointed at the server's IP address.
  • Plan for HTTPS — ChurchCRM handles member and giving data and should never run over plain HTTP in production.

Choose your guide​

Your serverGuide
Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 LTS, or DebianSelf-Hosted on Ubuntu / Debian
Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, RHELSelf-Hosted on Rocky Linux
DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, Vultr, AWS Lightsail, Google CloudVPS & Cloud Providers — how to size and create the VM, then follow the Ubuntu guide
Microsoft AzureAzure Cloud Setup

The underlying steps are the same everywhere: install Apache/PHP/MariaDB, create a database, deploy the release from GitHub, then open your site and complete the setup wizard.

Docker​

ChurchCRM is built and developed with Docker, but there is no officially maintained production Docker image — see Docker for why and what's available.

After installation​