Magento Installation Cheat Sheet

Magento is the most preferred option for ecommerce solutions. People outsource magento development from service providers and they provide solutions as per your needs. With the increase in demand of offshore magento development the developers are forced to pace up with all the needs of customers and learn all the latest updates. Now in this case magento installation is equally important for those who offshore magento development to their clients. You might find this article useful if you have installed magento in the past then you may just need to remember some of the major steps and rest would be easy for you. But if it is your first try then you need not worry so much instead refer magento installation guide which will help you out with full descriptions and troubleshooting information. Please find the links to additional installation instructions in the end.

What are the system requirements?

To run magento you need a Unix-based server with PHP 5.2 + MySQL 4.1.20 versions. This is your first step towards a web server that has a standard LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL& PHP).

The supporting environment for the server should be:

"Supported Operating Systems: Linux server
"Supported Web Servers: Apache 1.3.x or Apache 2
"PHP Compatibility: 5.2.0 and above with Safe mode off
"MySQL: 4.1.20 and above

You can refer the detailed information from Magento's System Requirements page or from "how do I know if my server is compatible with Magento?". This will give you a perfect idea to setup or test the server. If magento needs to be run for evaluation or development purpose then a local PC or Mac with local LAMP stack is fine. However they do not support production environments. At the time of installation of the localhost you can refer the links which are given at the bottom of this article which will give you additional considerations.

Installing Magento:

For installing magento successfully you need to follow four main steps and they are:

"Step 1 - Download Magento
"Step 2 - Set file permissions for the Setup Wizard
"Step 3 - Create your store database
"Step 4 - Run the web-based Setup Wizard
"All done!

Step 1. Download Magento: this step can be done by two methods one is to download magento to your computer and FTP it up to your server while the second one is to download magento directly to your server.

Step 2. Set file permissions for the Setup Wizard

By this step you are supposed to make the directories on your web server so that it setup wizard is writeable by the server. If FTP is used then the permissions should be set of each to 777 or check read/write/execute for owner, user and group.

Step 3. Create your store database: This step is out of the scope of this article so you need to consult you system administrator or your web host's support for instructions on how to perform it.

Step 4. Run the web-based Setup Wizard: This can be done by:

1.To use the browser and run the setup wizard : Go to your website by domain or IP address (yourDomain.com/magento or yourIP.0.0.1/magento) and the Setup Wizard will run automatically
2.Complete your configuration of magento installation in the setup wizard.

Your frontend store will have the URL yourDomain.com/magento
Your Admin Panel will have the URL yourDomain.com/magento/admin
(Log in using the username and password you created in the last step of the Setup Wizard)