Magento is a freely available shopping cart / ecommerce solution in production use all over the internet. In this article, I’ll be outlining the steps to install Magento Community edition in Debian Squeeze. It’s really quite simple if you’re using Apache2. While NginX is supported by the latest release of Magento, the steps to install using NginX won’t be outlined here, but may be in another article in the future!
First, install the base web server stack, and required php extensions:
apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server php5-mysql php5-mcrypt php5-curl php5-gd
During installation, you’ll be prompted to set up a root mysql password. Make sure it’s a strong password, and be sure to remember it.
After installing Apache2 should be running by default, but let’s restart it to make sure all the appropriate modules are loaded before we begin.
# service apache2 status
Apache2 is running (pid xxxx).
# service apache2 restart
Next, download Magento Community edition, and place the archive in the webroot folder, or other suitable subdirectory. For this article, I’m going to create a subdir called /var/www/cart. In Debian Squeeze, the default web root is /var/www
If you downloaded a .tar.bz2 file, you can unarchive/uncompress with the following command:
tar -jxvf <filename>
After everything is unarchived, you should change the ownership to www-data for all the Magento files. This will ensure Apache has the proper permissions to read the files:
chown www-data:www-data * -R
Okay, at this point Magento should be ready for setup! Just point your browser to your server’s IP, and start the process.
Coming soon: Setting up Magento itself, start to finish.
