FAQ

ivly is at an early stage, and I built it mainly for my own needs as an IT freelancer. In principle it works for any solo self-employed person or company that writes invoices in Germany. It currently assumes a single user and a single company.

GOBL (Go Business Language) is an open, JSON-based format for business documents such as invoices, parties and products, developed by Invopop under the Apache-2.0 license. ivly stores all business data as GOBL documents and converts them to XRechnung and ZUGFeRD. Your data stays in an open, documented format and is not tied to ivly.

Both. The stack runs with podman compose by default. For Docker, pass CONTAINER=docker to every make call, e.g. CONTAINER=docker make up.

No, and none is planned at the moment. ivly runs on your own infrastructure, your invoices stay with you.

Yes. Besides your notebook, ivly runs on any Linux server with Podman or Docker, e.g. a home server or a rented VPS. For automated installation on servers there is an Ansible role that sets ivly up as a systemd service (Podman Quadlet). It is still maturing and will be the basis for a private, remotely accessible self-hosted setup.

ivly has no built-in login. On a server reachable from outside, protect access at the reverse proxy, e.g. with basic auth or mTLS.

No. There is no tracking, no telemetry and no phone-home. At runtime the components only talk to each other inside the stack. The optional AI assistant uses an Ollama instance that you run yourself.

Once installed, ivly needs no internet connection. Installing and upgrading download the container images, and automatic HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt needs internet access. Fully air-gapped operation, with images transferred by hand, works in principle but is untested.

Not yet, a demo is in the works.

Until then you can set up your own: ivly-api comes with a seeder that fills the database with demo data, i.e. company details, customers, products and invoices including drafts. Inside the ivly-api devcontainer, run make seed, or make seed CLEAR=1 to reset the database first.

No, that is not planned. ivly runs in the browser, the stack runs in containers on your own infrastructure.

Check the changelog for notes on the new version first.

cd ivly && make backup

cd .. && curl -sSL https://codeberg.org/ivly/ivly-release/raw/branch/main/install.sh | sh

cd ivly && make pull && make up

Yes. ivly ships a default letterhead, your own PDFs replace it: one for the first page with header, one for the following pages without. Two ODT templates serve as a starting point.

curl -LO https://codeberg.org/api/packages/ivly/generic/letterhead-example/latest/letterhead-example-latest.tar.gz
tar xzf letterhead-example-latest.tar.gz

For pre-printed paper, the PDF can also be printed without the letterhead background.

Currently me, Kevin Horst. Bug reports, ideas and patches are welcome on Codeberg.

The ivly components (backoffice, API, printer, validation) are licensed under the AGPL-3.0. You may use ivly free of charge, also commercially, study and change it. If you offer a modified version to others over a network, you have to publish its source code under the same license. The invoices you create with ivly are yours and not affected by the license.

The PDF library gobl.latex is licensed under the Apache-2.0, so it can also be used in closed-source software.

Yes. ivly is open source under the AGPL-3.0 and costs nothing. Further development takes time, though. If ivly saves you work, a donation helps keep it going:

• Liberapay
• Ko-fi
• GitHub Sponsors
• Patreon