Apache Fineract can be set up in any environment: cloud or on-premises. Its flexible product configuration, KYC documentation support, business rule sets, payment transactions, and portfolio management can be quite helpful for organizations. However, you might face a few deployment-related issues with Fineract 1.x.

Here are some of the challenges you might face while deploying Fineract 1.x, their causes, and solutions.

#1. Timezone Tenant Configuration

Improper set up of timezone of the tenant can cause loan schedule, loan product, or charges payment dates to jump one date back or more.

Possible Causes:

• The difference in time zones
• Rebase of the upstream codebase

Possible Occurrence:

This error occurs due to any problem in system-wide configuration. So, each date in the system is likely affected.

Solution:

• Log in to your database
• Go to the fineract_tenants.tenants table
• Now change the timezone_id from e.g, “Asia/Kolkata” which is the default to “UTC” for all tenants

#2. Configuration Settings: Connection To Server

You might often come across a “connection to server issue” while attempting to log in. This usually occurs when there is an issue with the database or when Fineract 1.x is unable to establish a proper connection with the database or make queries accordingly.

• MySQL packet size issue

Possible Causes:

This error occurs because the maximum allowed packet value permitted by the MySQL server is 4MB by default and it is too small to handle certain queries.

Possible Occurrence:

You possibly will come across this while trying to log into Fineract 1.x via the Community App or might be any other case.

Solution:

• Login to MySQL and change the “maxallowedpacket” for every user to 67MB until the server restarts.

Or

• Remove the MySQL docker container. And create a new container, passing the following flag “—max-allowed-packet=67108864”.

• MySQL user denied access

Possible Causes:

If you are unable to log in to the MySQL server.

Possible Occurrence:

The error comes up indicating that the application was trying to connect to a user “root” with hostname “172.17.0.1” which was unavailable.

Solution:

• Create a new user “root“ with hostname “172.17.0.1”
• Enter “somepassword“ as the root user’s password
• Grant all privileges to new user
• Implement the changes

Read here to further learn about more challenges and their solutions, faced while setting up Apache Fineract 1.x.