Installing the Nymble SQL Connector

The connector is the part of Nymble that lives on your machine. It runs as a Windows service in the background, reads from QuickBooks through the driver you’ll install later, and sends what it finds to Nymble over outbound HTTPS. Nothing connects in to it — which is why there’s no firewall rule, no port to open, and no account to create in this lesson. You download it, run one file, and it’s there.

Install it on the same Windows machine as QuickBooks. It has to be: the driver can only reach a QuickBooks that’s running beside it.

Steps

1. Download the Windows ZIP. The current release is at nymblecommerce.com/download/sql-connector. It’s about 50 MB and needs nothing else — no .NET runtime, no prerequisites — so save it wherever you like. Downloads is fine.

2. Extract the whole ZIP. Right-click it, choose Extract All…, and accept the suggested folder. The extracted folder holds install.cmd, update.cmd, a README.txt, and an app folder with the connector itself.

   Don’t skip this. Double-clicking install.cmd from inside the ZIP, in Explorer’s preview, extracts just that one file to a temporary folder — without the app folder beside it, the installer has nothing to install. It notices and tells you so, but it’s a minute you don’t need to lose.

3. Double-click install.cmd and answer Yes to the administrator prompt. The installer registers a Windows service, which is why it needs to elevate. Windows may first ask you to confirm you want to run a file that came from the internet — that’s its standard caution about any downloaded file, and Run is the right answer.

   A console window opens and works through the install: it copies the files, starts the connector once on its own to prove it runs (a five-second pause — that’s deliberate), registers the service, starts it, and puts a shortcut on the desktop. It ends with Installation Complete! and the addresses of everything it created. Press any key to close it.

4. Open the admin page. There’s now a NymbleCommerce SQL Connector shortcut on the desktop; it opens http://localhost:5199 in your browser, and you can type that address instead any time. You’ll land on the dashboard, which lays out the three setup steps in the order they have to happen — Source Connection, API Connection, Endpoints — with each one unlocking the next.

   Leave it there for now. The first of those steps needs the QuickBooks driver and a DSN that don’t exist yet; the rest of this course builds them, and the connect-and-test lesson brings you back to this page to fill it in.

What just happened

Four things, and it helps to know where they are when something needs attention later:

• A Windows service called NymbleCommerceSQLConnector is running and set to start with the machine. If it crashes, Windows restarts it on its own. You never need to launch the connector by hand.
• The program files are in C:\Program Files\NymbleCommerce\SQLConnector\.
• Configuration, logs, and the encryption key are in C:\ProgramData\NymbleCommerce\SQLConnector\. The key protects the API key and database credentials you’ll save later, so that folder is readable only by administrators and the service itself.
• The admin page listens on this machine only. localhost:5199 answers at the machine itself, or through a remote desktop session to it, and nowhere else. That’s a security property, not a limitation: nobody on your network can reach the connector’s settings.

Good to know

• It only talks outward. The connector makes outbound HTTPS requests to Nymble and nothing else; no inbound connection is ever made to it. If someone asks what to open on the firewall, the answer is nothing.
• “install.ps1 cannot be loaded … is not digitally signed.” You ran the PowerShell script in the app folder directly, and Windows is refusing a script that came from a downloaded ZIP. Use install.cmd instead — it handles this. If you’d rather stay in PowerShell, run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Force first; it affects that one window and nothing else.
• “Service ‘NymbleCommerceSQLConnector’ already exists.” The connector was installed here before. Run update.cmd from the new folder instead of install.cmd — it replaces the program files and keeps the configuration. To start completely clean, run app\uninstall.cmd first.
• Don’t double-click the .exe. Running NymbleCommerce.SQLConnector.Host.exe from Explorer starts it as you, without administrator rights, and it stops immediately because it can’t write to its data folder. The service is the only way it’s meant to run.
• Updating later is the same ZIP routine with a different file: extract the new release, double-click update.cmd. Your settings, encryption key, and sync history survive, and a backup of the previous version is made first.
• Removing it is app\uninstall.cmd, which removes the service and the program files but leaves your configuration and logs in place. app\uninstall.cmd -RemoveAll takes those too.
• Supported Windows: Windows 10 or 11, or Windows Server 2016 and later, 64-bit. Windows 11 on ARM works as well — the connector runs under x64 emulation.