Magento is the one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in use on the web today. It is trusted by some of the largest global brands including Samsung, Nestle, Nespresso and Nike, to power their online stores along with millions of small and mid-sized companies around the world.
At Clook, one of our specialisms is providing highly optimised Magento hosting solutions. These have historically only been available on our cloud or dedicated server platforms – mainly due to Magento’s resource demands.
After many hours spent designing, testing and benchmarking (with the odd cup of coffee in between!), I’m pleased to say that we will shortly be rolling out our finely tuned Magento server stacks. These will make hosting a quick Magento site a breeze, even on smaller budgets – you should follow our Twitter account if you want the announcement first.
In the meantime, we will be running weekly Magento tutorials to help you get up to speed. Starting with installing Magento and working our way through to optimising it.
Steps to install Magento
Note
Although you can install Magento on shared environments, we don’t recommend it on a live site due to the hardware resources that Magento requires.
Download Magento
Visit https://www.magentocommerce.com/download and download a copy of Magento.
Which version you choose is entirely up to you. We currently recommend Magento 1.9, it has time tested stability and currently has more extensions
Upload Magento to your hosting account
Upload the file you downloaded in step 1 to your hosting account.
I want the Magento install to run from www.yoursite.com, so I’ll upload the file to the document root folder, which is normally public_html or www.
If you want it to run in a subfolder like www.yoursite.com/store/ you need to extract the content to the relevant sub-folder. In this case /public_html/store
Once the file has uploaded, extract it. If you’re using cPanel, you simply highlight the file within cPanel > File Manager and click extract
Create a database for Magento
Create a MySQL database and assign a user to it through cPanel > MySQL Databases. You’ll need the database and database user details shortly, so have them handy
Install Magento
Now that you have uploaded and extracted the files for Magento and created a database and database user, you can proceed with the installation by visiting the site where you uploaded the files in step 1.
In step 1 I uploaded and extracted the files in the public_html and so will navigate to www.yoursite.com to proceed with the installation
Click on the check box next to “I agree to the above terms and conditions” and click on the Continue button.
Now, choose the preferred Time Zone, Locale and Currency and press the Continue button:
Next, enter the database details: Database Name, User Name and User Password created in step 3. You can leave the other options as is. Make sure that you tick the “Skip Base URL validation before next step” option. Then, click the Continue button to proceed.
At this point you should enter the personal information and the admin login details which you want to use. You can leave the Encryption Key field empty, this will be auto generated and displayed on the next page. Click the Continue button:
Finally, note your encryption key; it will be used by Magento to encrypt passwords, credit cards and other confidential information.
Summary
If you followed the guide, you should now have a fully functioning Magento store up and running.
I’ll guide you through installing your first extension next week.
