Magento Commerce Install Guide
This is a step-by-step tutorial on installing Magento Commerce on one of our Split-Shared hosting accounts. I was recently introduced to Magento in a pre-sales chat. Up until that chat, I had never heard about it, but decided to check it out.
I’ve personally used and recommended osCommerce whenever someone asked about a good shopping cart program, but I have to admit, this is by far the best open source application out there.
- Introduction
- Step 1: Download Magento
- Step 2: Upload Magento
- Step 3: Set File Permissions
- Step 4: Create A MySQL Database
- Step 5: Run The Setup Wizard
- Troubleshooting
Oudated Tutorial
This tutorial is quite old, so we’ll be releasing a new tutorial once the stable release comes out this month.
You’ll most likely run into problems trying to follow the instructions on here, so you can either submit a ticket and we’ll install it for free, or you can read my comment below that gives you instructions for installing Magneto via SSH.
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.0/magento-1.0.tar.gz
tar -zxvf magento-1.0.tar.gz
cd magento
chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc
chmod -R o+w media
./pear mage-setup .
./pear install -f magento-core/Mage_All_Latest
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*
cd ..
chmod -R 777 magento
Oh, and we’re also a Magento partner now 
Introduction
If you haven’t heard of Magento, there’s probably a good reason why. The system requirements to even install this are typically not found with most hosting companies, at least, that’s what I’ve found after browsing around their forum and help sections. Magento requires PHP 5, although there is a workaround for those running PHP 4. At the time of writing this article, here is what we run:
- Apace 2.2.6
- PHP 5.2.4
- MySQL 5.0.27
All of our Split-Shared hosting servers meet and/or exceed these requirements, and all of the PHP extensions should be installed. If you find that an extension is not installed, please submit a ticket to technical support and they will install it. We maintain the latest stable builds of all installed software.
For this article, Magento was tested and installed on an actual Split-Shared hosting machine, so you will be able to follow this without any problems.
Step 1: Download Magento
The first thing you need to do is download the latest version. You’ll want to select the appropriate format to download. I selected the default zip file for this tutorial, but you can select whatever you are most comfortable with.
You’ll notice that there are two versions, a standard install, and a full install. The full installation is much larger, and includes sample data, like stores, categories, products, image, etc.
Step 2: Upload Magento
Now that we’ve downloaded the latest version of Magento to our computer, we need to extract it to a folder and then upload it via FTP.
When you open up the zip file, you’ll see a folder called magento. Just extract this file to your desktop. You can rename it to whatever you want before you upload it, but we’ll leave it as is.
Using your favorite FTP program, upload the magento folder to your public_html directory. If you don’t remember the login details or are having trouble, catch us in live chat or submit a ticket to technical support.
Since all Split-Shared hosting accounts come with SSH access, you can save a lot of time by downloading and unpacking Magento using shell. Magento has a tutorial on how to do this if you are interested.
Step 3: Set File Permissions
There are a couple ways to do this. You can do this from your domain’s control panel, your favorite FTP program, or SSH. You will need to set the following to 777, or writable by the server:
- magento/app/etc
- magento/media
- magento/var
- magento/var/.htaccess
If you downloaded the full version of Magento, the one with the sample store data, you will need to set all of the directories in the media folder to 777 as well. There were only two folders in the media file when I downloaded this:
- magento/media/catalog
- magento/media/upload
Below are instructions on how to do this through the control panel, an FTP program, and SSH. If you are unsure on how to do this, you can submit a ticket to technical support and they can set the permissions for you.
Control Panel
Login to the control panel for your domain, e.g. domain.com/cpanel, and click on the File Manager icon under the Files section.
Make sure that Show hidden files (dotfiles) is selected.
To open a folder, you need to double-click on the folder icon. When you’re ready to change the permissions of a file or folder, select the checkbox next to it. Then, click on Change Permissions icon.
A box will popup where you can change the permissions. For this install, it will always be 777.
FTP
You’ll want to check the help guide for your FTP program on how to do this, but typically, if you right-click the folder or file on the server, there should be an option to set the permissions or attributes (also known as chmod). You will see something like this pop up:
SSH
If you’re already familiar with SSH, I probably don’t need to explain how to do this. Magento has a tutorial on how to do this with SSH, which is available here.
Step 4: Create A MySQL Database
Login to your domain’s control panel, e.g. domain.com/cpanel, and click on the MySQL Database Wizard icon under Databases.
This will walk you through the process of setting up a new database and database user. If you already have a user setup that you want to use for this database, you can still use the wizard, just make sure you enter the existing username and password that you’ve setup.
The first step is to give the database a name. We will call it magento.
Next, we are going to create a user that can access this database. If you already have a user setup that you want to use, just type the same username and password in here.
Finally, we need to make sure this user has full privileges for this database. You can check the All Privileges box to do this.
And that’s it. We just created a user and assigned it full privileges to the database. You will want to make note of the prefix attached to the database name. The prefix is same as the username you use to access the control panel, e.g. username_dbname.
Step 5: Run The Setup Wizard
Now we can launch the installation wizard in our browser. You can access this by going to:
http://www.yourdomain.com/magento/
It will automatically redirect you to the installation guide. After you review and agree to the license and set your locale settings, the next step is the configuration.
Database Connection
You will enter the database variables that you setup in Step 4 above. Remember, both the database name and username will be prefixed with the username you use to access the control panel for your domain. You will leave the Host section as is.
Default Store
Magento should have this filled in correctly, so nothing needs to be changed here.
Secure Connection
You’ll enter the same information here that you did for the default store section, unless you have your own SSL certificate.
You’re Done!
That’s all the configuration you need to do. Follow the rest of the instructions until you are finished.
After you finish the installation, you will be redirected to the Magento storefront. You can access the backend and start adding categories and products.
Troubleshooting
If you have any problems installing Magento, please submit a ticket to technical support. Magento has been tested and installed on an actual Split-Shared hosting machine, so everything should work smoothly.
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I am trying to configure my server to run magento but still getting issues. Could you please email me your phpinfo() so I can check it against mine to see if there is something that I am missing?
Thanks,
V.