Intallation 500 Internal Server Error

I'm having trouble with an initial installation of Akaunting on my server. Everything I've tried - automatic and manual installation attempts - have left a "500 Internal Server Error." I've checked and confirmed my host meets all the requirements. I've attempted letting Akaunting try to do a self install, and I've attempted revising the ".env.example" file. I'm not a programmer/developer, so in trying to follow the instructions (https://akaunting.com/hc/docs/on-premise/installation/) I used various data, because the screenshot for the ".env" file is somewhat ambiguous to me.

I also saw that if there's not a previous version of Akaunting installed, then doing this manually pretty much won't work. (Unless that note is related to updates.)

Anyone have any suggestions?

Hi Christopher,

First, one important check: where did you get the files from?

- If you downloaded the ZIP from https://akaunting.com/download, it is ready
to install — just unzip and open the site in your browser, the installer
will create the .env for you. You should NOT edit .env.example by hand.

- If you cloned the GitHub repository, that is the developer version. It has
no vendor/ folder and no built assets, so it will always return a 500 until
you run composer install and npm install && npm run prod. For a normal
installation, use the ZIP instead.

Then check these three:

1. Document root: your domain must point to the "public" folder, not to the
Akaunting root folder.

2. Permissions — these must be writable by the web server user:
chmod -R 775 storage bootstrap/cache

3. PHP version and extensions: PHP 8.1+ with bcmath, ctype, curl, dom,
fileinfo, gd, intl, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo, tokenizer, xml, zip.

To see the real cause instead of the generic 500, open:
storage/logs/laravel.log
and post the last 20 lines here — the actual error message is in there.

(The note about "a previous version" applies to manual updates only, not to a
fresh installation.)