Removing the multi-company feature

wrongecho

I just wanted to gather any thoughts or objections to removing the multi-company feature in ITFlow.

Johnny and I have discussed this and feel that if you are operating more than 1 MSP (or need a place to dev/test), it probably makes more sense to set up a completely separate ITFlow instance.

https://github.com/itflow-org/itflow/issues/532

adzbez

I think the multi company feature could be good for example a large MSP that wants to separate their units by location (ie if a unit in one part of the country doesn't share the same clients as another unit).. It may also be a useful function for anyone thinking of providing hosted instances of IT Flow, allowing a single beefy install in a multi-tenant fashion??

Those are just my thoughts, I personally like the function.

wrongecho

adzbez

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

We hadn't considered the multi-location part of this, it's certainly an interesting use case. That said, ITFlow is definitely targeted towards small / medium sized MSPs - not large multinationals.

Are you using ITFlow in this way? Or do you have plans to in the future?

In terms of providing hosted instances, I believe this is initially why the feature was added. However, we decided that it's definitely going to be better to spin up separate instances per Company than hosting one big instance (if hosting was ever an option in the future). This makes things like backups, restores, upgrades much more scoped and manageable. This also prevents any potential bugs from leaking client info across companies.

lued

I agree this is best to be deprecated especially if we can streamline the installation / containerization of instances. Spinning up another instance shouldn't cause too much overhead on a host if we can dockerize. Then we can deprecate and simplify the database / codebase.

johnny

Yes I agree this will dramatically cleanup the code. The process will begin.

smcs

I personally love this feature and was 1 main feature that led me to this software. I have several companies that I run and own myself and having all of them available to me on 1 host was a huge benefit. Removing this will make me have to setup an instance for each company, that makes it a pain really. I do see your reasoning, but wouldn't it be better to let the user decide how they want to use it? Just my opinion but I wanted to put it out there.

lued

@smcs Please take a look at my docker PR that will streamline the ITFlow setup process. It will be easier to have separation of integrations / settings with this method (e.g. different emails for each company you run, different domains, different settings in totality). This is overall an improvement for your multi-company set up by separation (minus maybe some templates / settings you have to replicate across multiple containers?).

With a couple of tweaks to the docker/traefik-complete/docker-compose.yml file for Traefik, you can spin up multiple "itflow" containers on a single host pointing to one "itflow-db" container with multiple ITFlow databases.

You would then just have to setup each database name through the setup.php (or config.php) of each respective ITFlow container on initialization.

You can then backup your existing itflow multi-company instance and add the restore to each ITFlow container, then delete the companies not associated to the respective ITFlow company container.

Let me know if this doesn't work for your multi-tenant setup.

johnny

@smcs Would the solution @lued work? I do agree we should let the community vote on the multi -company feature, however it really would significantly improve the code base and allow even further development of more features to happen much faster.

One company per instance.

another_msp_ops_guy

I would vote for the separation. +1 for multi-company removal.

johnny

The next update which will be released this week will completely remove multi company functionality and is going to require some manual intervention after the update.

Moving Files around in the upload folder
Making sure you have only 1 company
Making sure that the company has a company_id of 1
We also highly recommend backing up before updating

More instructions will come before release and will be posted in a separate post

wrongecho

Update has been released, please see: https://forum.itflow.org/d/117-massive-update-please-read-before-and-after-you-update