Manually installing Magento

- [Instructor] If you're not using a host that provides some sort of automatic Magento installation for you, that's fine. We're going to talk through the process here. And in the next video, we'll troubleshoot a few problems that may come up. So first, of course, you need to download Magneto. To do that, you go to magento.com, hover over products and solutions. In the Open Source version of Magento is Magento Community edition. So under products, find Community edition and click on that. Then you'll click download now. And we have a few options here, as you'll see. Generally, you'll simply want the full release ZIP with no sample data. Of course, if you do want sample data to play around with, you can go down here and get that version. For this tutorial, we're going to go with no sample data. And you'll want the most recent version. That's going to be at the top here, so then click select your format, and this is whether you're downloading a ZIP file, a tar.gz file or a tar.bz2 file. Many environments do work well with tar.gz files, which are smaller than ZIP. Many work well with bz2, as well. ZIP is fairly universal, so I'm just going to use that one for this tutorial. Download that, and again, if one of these doesn't work in your situation, then just download the other one and try. But ZIP, even though it's a little bit larger, it is the option that'll work with just about any host. So you'll select that and click download. And then you'll be taken to this screen. If you don't already have a Magento account, you have to create one in order to download Magento. So if you don't have one, go ahead and click create an account now and go through that process. If you have created an account already, just type in your email and password so you can log in, and then it will allow you to download the ZIP file. Now after you have downloaded Magento, you're going to need to upload it, of course, and whether you're using something like this or something like cPanel or even FTP, I highly recommend to upload the tar or ZIP file that you downloaded and extract it on your server, if that is at all possible, rather than extracting it on your own, local computer, and then uploading all of the files individually. The reason I recommend this is that Magento is a particularly large platform. Compared to other popular platforms, such as Wordpress and Drupal Wordpress, fully extracted is about 25 megabytes. Drupal eight, fully extracted, is about 90 megabytes. Magento, full extracted, is 360 megabytes. That takes a while to upload, especially because it's lots of different files that have to be individually uploaded. It can take quite a long time. So if you're just uploading the ZIP or tar file, however, that's much faster. So again, if you can extract a file in your hosting environment, and you can do this, for instance, if you're using cPanel, then do that. Upload the tar or ZIP file and then extract it there, and the process will be much, much faster. Once you've uploaded Magento to the proper place in your file manager, which is usually something called HTML. It's usually a directory called HTML or public underscore HTML, you'll need to go to your file manager, and you can do this in your FTP client, if you want, or your hosting control panel. Here, you see my site is in HTML. So I'm going to go into the HTML folder. And here is the entirety of my Magento site. Of course, most of it is found in these directories here. And you'll want to double check the permissions on a few of these directories before you start the actual installation process. First, you want to check the vendor directory and make sure it has write permissions for the user. That's the W here. And some control panels will out right say write, read, and execute, which is what these R, W, and X mean. Make sure you have write selected here. That looks good for us. Then you'll want to check var and make sure it also has write permissions for the user, which is this first W, if you're using the R, W, X, dash, dash, X, dash, dash, X. If you're using that syntax. If you're looking at this, this first W means the user has write permissions, so that's good. Then you want to check. Go inside the app folder and check the et C folder. We see that user does have write permissions here. That's good, as well. And then the last one you want to confirm has write permissions is inside pub. The static directory. And we see that we have write permissions set up here for us already, in this case, as well. So we're all set. Notice there are a number of other folders that do have write permissions, as well. That's perfectly fine. We're not checking to make sure only vendor and var and these other folders have write permissions. We just specifically have to make sure that these folders do, indeed, have write permissions. If others have them, that doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong at all. Now the next step in this process, before you actually begin installing Magento is to create a database. Now again, depending on how you're accessing your hosting environment, this process is going to be very different. If you're using the command line, you probably already know how to create a database there. If you're using something like Nexcess's control panel or a host that uses cPanel, you should have an option somewhere. For me, it's under hosting features. That says MySQL or My Sequel, however you like to pronounce it. And then databases, or you might just have an app called MySQL Databases. If you go there, you should be able to create a new database. We see we can do that here. We type in our database name. Optionally, create a user to go along with it and click add. Now you do always have to have some sort of MySQL user created, and then they also have to have permissions for that database in order for your site to be able to access that database because the site basically acts as the user that you create here, and you're going to input that information later during the installation process. So if you don't already have a MySQL user set up, as well, or if you're not sure, and if you have the option, it's good to go ahead and create a user along with the database. Sometimes, these are two separate steps. You create a database and then you go to something like MySQL users and then create a new user and then assign it to that database and make sure it has permissions to basically do everything. And then once you have that database created, and once again, you have Magento uploaded to the proper directory on your hosting platform, and you've checked your file permissions, as we did, then you're ready to install your site. Now the site installation process, again, I'm not going to walk through it explicitly for a few reasons, but mostly because it'll walk you through everything on its own, and there's no reason for us to do that. Also, there are a few minor security concerns that come along with creating a video like this and putting in all of our database access information, even if we remove it later, so what you're going to do at this point, once you have your database created and a user assigned to it and your files uploaded, then you're going to go to your domain slash setup. When you go there, Magento is going to first walk you through a few steps to get everything set up and to make sure that your hosting environment, all of your permissions settings are correct for a Magento installation. If it catches anything that's going to cause it to not quite work, it will halt the installation there so you don't end up with some sort of buggy installation or a website that's only halfway going to work or maybe looks like it's working but isn't actually going to work at all. During this process, you're going to have to create a user account. You're going to have to provide it the database name that you just created, as well as the password and username to log into that database. Or to access that database, rather. And during this process, it's fairly common to encounter various errors and problems. If you do encounter anything that stops the process for you and you can't quite figure it out, please refer to our next video where I'm going to walk you through a few of the more common installation problems. So again, if you come across these, don't get discouraged. It's not uncommon, and I'm going to try to walk you through a few of those to help expedite your troubleshooting process. Now near the end of your Magento installation process, it's going to provide you with an admin URL. And it's going to look something like your domain slash admin underscore and then six or seven random numbers and letters. Make sure you keep track of this path. Because this is where you're going to log in to the back end of your new Magento site. If you don't have this URL, you won't be able to access the back end of your site and basically, you won't be able to create your actual Magento site. If you do forget it, though, it's not the end of the world. There is a way to find that. If you forget your admin path, go back to your file system for your site. For me, that's here under file manager. Find your site installation, then go to app, et C, and this ENV dot PHP file. If you access that, then right here near the top, you'll see this array that has an index called front name. This text here, in this case, it's a little bit different from what I told you it would be, but in many cases, it is admin, underscore, and then some random characters. In our case, it's ostraini_admin. This is the path to log into the admin section of your site to log into the back end. So you would go to your domain slash this text right here. Again, that's if you forget it in the first place. Try to keep track of it, if you can. Once you've uploaded your site, you've extracted all the files and checked the permissions, as we've done, and then created a new database that has a user attached to it, you need to go to your domain slash setup to begin the installation process, or rather, the pre-installation process. If you navigate to that URL, you'll get a page that looks like this. Click agree and setup Magento. And then Magento is going to walk you through this process that makes sure everything is set up properly for installation. This is where, if you're going to run into any problems or stumbling blocks or errors or whatever, this is where those are going to happen. The good thing is, if they do happen, they happen before the actual installation process, and it forces you to work out those problems before it installs, so that way, you don't end up with some messed up installation. So we're going to click start readiness check. And this is the first place where you might come across some problems. You might come across a PHP version error, a PHP settings problem, or an issue with the PHP extensions that you have installed on your server. Or rather extensions that you don't have installed on your server, but that Magento does need. We're going to cover these in the next tutorial, so if you're having trouble here, you can't get past this, check out the next video in this tutorial where we're going to address some of these issues that hopefully, will help you out. But after it's done with all of these and the file permission's checked, we're going to click next. Now we need to tell it where the database is that we created and what it's called and how to access it. In 99% of cases, the database server host is at local host. In other words, it's on the actual server that this is running from. The database server username is going to be the name that you set up during the process of you creating a database and assigning a user to it. Just for slight security reasons, I'm not going to put my own information on here, but once again, just put in the username that you created. Sometimes, it starts with some sort of account name that you have on cPanel and then an underscore and then the actual username that you created, so pay attention to that. Then you'll put in the name that you called your database when you created it. And again, sometimes, these do have the prefix of your account name and an underscore, followed by the actual name you typed in. So once again, do pay close attention to that. And you don't have to worry about table prefix. So go ahead and enter all that information and then click next. And it'll ask you for your store address. Basically, your domain. And then it's also going to give you a Magento admin address. You need to keep track of this. So write this down somewhere. This is the address that you're going to need in order to access the back end of your site and essentially build your Magento site. So once you have that written down, and you make sure you have the right address here, you'll click next, and then you'll put in some basic information for your store, set your default time zone. For me, Central Standard Time, Chicago is where I am. U.S. dollar is the currency that I'm using. Default store language will be English. Click next. Then you're going to create an admin account. Now as a general security rule, it's best to not give your admin account the name, simply admin. That just makes it slightly easier for malicious users to hack, if they're trying to break into your site. Admin is a very common admin account name, as you can probably imagine, so if you use something different, that just helps you out a little bit security wise. It's kind of a basic measure. I'm just going to go with store owner Rob. You might want to use something more professional, in a lot of cases. Then you'll enter your email address. The one that you want associated with this account. And of course, a password. And click next. And then once you're done, the last step is to simply click install. It's checked everything, it's got everything set up. It's verified that it's able to install properly now. So just click install. And then you're just going to wait until it's finished installing. Once it's finished installing, you'll see this screen. Again, it gives you your Magento admin address one last time. Copy this down somewhere, if you haven't already. And then you can launch Magento admin, which takes you to the same admin address. Here, you're going to type in the username and password you just created, and it'll take you to the back end of the website. Once you're logged in, Magento will take you straight to your dashboard. This is where you start customizing and creating your site. If it looks like this, you're all set. If it looks a little bit off, like if some of the images aren't showing up right or if all of this text is kind of pushed down the page, that's a problem that we're going to address in the next video, the troubleshooting video. So it's not a big deal. It's something that's usually easily fixable, so don't worry about that. Once you have gotten to this screen, there's just one last thing we need to do. You need to go back to your file system, go into your app directory, find your et C folder, and now we need to remove write permissions from this folder. So however your control panel does that, find out how you edit permissions, remove write permissions from this et C directory, and once you've done that, you're all set. Now your site is installed. And again, if you've encountered any problems at any point in this process, check out our next video in which I'm going to address a few problems that may come up.