Recently one of my clients asked me to install the Community Edition of the Magento eCommerce product on his site. The Community Edition is open source and so there isn’t a support package but for the forums and wiki pages that you’ll have to navigate to find the help you might need.

I had been investigating Magento installation back in June when I was also looking at using Foxy Cart for one of my sites. The forums over at Media Temple where I was planning on hosting the eCommerce site weren’t giving a thumbs up to Magento – so I went with Foxy Cart integrating it to the Quantum Gateway over at CDG. So when my client said he wanted to use Magento I thought – great this will give me a chance to see how it compares. The site was to be hosted on one of the RackSpace cloud servers. Qualms about database being housed on the cloud server arose in some of the forums, but we decided to give it a try.

The Community Edition of the Magento is a big folder. I would suggest using the shell install rather than trying to upload through ftp unless you have spare time on your hands. I feel at easy with the shell access, but I know not every one is. Just so you know, it’s not as difficult as you would think.

The documentation on the Magento site is easy to follow installation cheat sheet. I came across a couple stumbling blocks.

When working through the shell remember to do the installation through the user that has access to the folder you are loading Magento into instead of working through root. It will save you a headache and time.

Simple. Once you have moved from into the directory you want to install to.

wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/(the newest stable issue I used 1.5.0.1)/magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz
Then unpack the install.
tar -zxvf magento-1.5.0.1.tar.gz

Talk about quick – trying to upload on an ftp will take forever – the wget will do it in an instance.

cd(change directory) to /magento this will put you in the magento directory

you need to change some permissions:
chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc
chmod -R o+w media

that will set the proper permissions for the installation.

It is suggested that you download the sample data and database – but I found this really screwed up the installation. Just create a database in your domains mysql – I called mine cleverly magento. No tables.

Now go to a web browser – I found Safari was a bit buggy with the redirects something about too many redirects – i see this often in Safari and I think it really sucks, so I used FireFox – worked like a charm. http://(yourdomain)/magento/ – that’s all you have to do – it will take you to the installation.

There is the agreement you have to agree to. Then a page for localization – country, time zone, currency.

Then comes the configuration: you’ll have to have the following – database name, user name, user password, probably localhost unless you are hosting the database somewhere else.

You have to make some other decisions. – I would make sure that you have Apache rewrites enabled and use Web Server (Apache) Rewrites.

The wizard will build all of the tables, set up the installation if you have done everything correctly and ask you for Name, Contact, User Name and Password. Once you submit – an Encryption Key will be generated for you.

You have installed Magento.

If you want help installing Magento send us an email.

Our next blog update will cover integrating WordPress with Magento.