Magento Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial covers installation of Magento on your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account. NEXCESS.NET is proud to be a Magento web hosting partner. This tutorial is meant to help you quickly setup and configure Magento with our web hosting service.

We have tutorials covering a wide variety of other ecommerce packages as well - check out our eCommerce Tutorials!

Magento is a popular shopping cart and E-Commerce solution that rivals Zen Cart, CubeCart, OSCommerce. What distinguishes Magento from other E-Commerce solutions is its cutting edge features. Magento is distributed under the OSL 3.0 (Open Software License) meaning it is free to download and use.

Make sure your host supports Magento! This step only applies only if you don't have a NEXCESS.NET hosting plan - all of our shared and reseller plans support Magento. If you're not a NEXCESS.NET client, then you can check the minimum requirements for Magento and make sure that your web hosting account meets the requirements.

1. First, set up a database for Magento
   The first thing to do is to run through the SiteWorx MySQL tutorials and create a MySQL username and database for Magento to store the information it needs. For this tutorial, we are going to use db_user as the Magento database user and mgnto_db as the Magento database.
2. You can unpack the file on your local computer and then upload them to your site via FTP - just be sure to upload to the directory you want to run Magento in
   Download and extract the Magento software
   Go to the Magento download page and download either the ".zip" or ".tar.gz" version of the software. For this tutorial, we'll assume you've downloaded the .tar.gz version. Upload the file to the home directory of your site. Once completed open an SSH session to your website. If you do not have SSH access or are unfamiliar with SSH, you may want to check out our SSH tutorial. You can then extract the file in SSH by using this command: tar -zxvf magento-installer-0.8.16100.tar.gz
3. Running the online install script
   
   Get a PHP error? You can read more about this error herea - there is no need to upgrade to a php5 server, the folks at Magento Commerce have provided a simple solution.
   Magento has a web-based install script. Point your browser to http://johnsmith.com/magento, replacing johnsmith.com with your domain name and magento with the directory were you put the magento files. You should now see the Magento install script. Read and accept the license agreement, then select your appropriate locale, currency, and time zone, then click continue. Go to your FTP client and change the permissions on all the folders in the Magento folder to 777. You will need to change them back to 755 after the installation is complete. click on "Proceed with Automatic Beta"
   
   Choose this to automatically download any updated files
   The installer will now commence the installation of Magento. Once the installer has completed, a window will pop-up confirming that the installation was successful.
4. Finishing the Magento installation
   Fill-in the MySQL settings you configured earlier. In our case the database name will be johnsmit_mgnto_db and the username will be johnsmit­_db_user. You may use the Web Server (Apache) Rewrites and Secure URLs (SSL) if you wish, click continue.
   
   You can choose whether to use SSL or apache URL rewrites - probably both a good idea
   Fill in your personal information and your login information. At the box labeled "Encryption Key" leave it blank unless you know what type of key to enter. Magento uses this key to encrypt passwords, credit cards and more. If this field is left empty the system will create an encryption key for you and will display it on the next page. Click continue. Finally Magento will display "You're All Set" - make note of the encryption key before you go any further! Then go to your FTP client and change the permissions of all the Magento folders back to 755.

You have succsesfully completed your Magento Installation! For future reference you can access the magento admin page by pointing your favorit browser to http://johnsmith.com/magento/index.php/admin/. If you're a NEXCESS.NET customer and have any problems with your Magento website, please log in to my.nexcess.net and submit a ticket, and our support techs will get in touch!

Back to web hosting tutorials page, or for more information on how we can help with your eCommerce website, check out our eCommerce hosting.