Self-host SuiteCRM
CRMSuiteCRM is a long-established open-source CRM covering sales, marketing, and customer-service modules, forked from an early SugarCRM Community Edition. It publishes no official Docker image — self-hosters commonly run the release zip on the official PHP and MariaDB Docker Library images instead.
Key facts
Reach for SuiteCRM when you want the deepest feature set here — its SugarCRM lineage is the closest thing to Salesforce's own module depth (sales, marketing, support, workflow automation) — and you can give it a real box. If you don't need that depth, EspoCRM or Vtiger cover similar ground on half the RAM and a simpler LAMP-style deploy.
What you need
- Any VPS with at least 2048 MB of RAM
- A domain you control — most self-hosted setups need HTTPS in front of them
- About an afternoon — budget time for troubleshooting
Install
Run these commands on your server:
# SuiteCRM ships no official Docker image — this builds a minimal one
# (stock php:8.2-apache lacks the extensions SuiteCRM requires)
mkdir suitecrm && cd suitecrm
cat <<'EOF' > Dockerfile
FROM php:8.2-apache
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
libpng-dev libzip-dev libicu-dev libc-client-dev libkrb5-dev && \
docker-php-ext-configure imap --with-kerberos --with-imap-ssl && \
docker-php-ext-install gd imap intl mbstring pdo_mysql zip && \
rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
EOF
cat <<'EOF' > docker-compose.yml
services:
suitecrm-db:
image: mariadb:11
environment:
MARIADB_DATABASE: suitecrm
MARIADB_USER: suitecrm
MARIADB_PASSWORD: database_password
MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: root_password
volumes:
- suitecrm-db:/var/lib/mysql
restart: always
suitecrm:
build: .
ports:
- "8080:80"
volumes:
- ./suitecrm:/var/www/html
depends_on:
- suitecrm-db
restart: always
volumes:
suitecrm-db:
EOF
# Download the release zip from suitecrm.com into ./suitecrm, then:
docker compose up -d # → http://SERVER_IP:8080/install.phpWhat you take on
SuiteCRM is a bigger operational commitment than the lighter CRMs in this cluster, not just a bigger download: