Introduction
Have any plans to sell products online, and wonder how to create a online shopping cart solution like e-Bay, Flipkart and Snapdeal, or where to find the right e-Commerce shopping solution for your needs, well, then you should definitely give a try to PrestaShop, a free, open source e-Commerce tool.
PrestaShop is an open source, free e-Commerce shopping cart solution used by more than 1,30,000+ online stores around the Globe, and with having a big community member. It is being used by most people because of its simplicity to install and configure, modern structure and very light weight e-Commerce software.
PrestaShop 1.6 is out!
PrestaShop team has announced the latest version 1.6 is available to download. For more details about this new release, visit here.
Features
Some of its notable features are:
– Full featured WYSIWYG editor.
– Featured products will be displayed in the homepage.
– Built-in product image zoom option.
– Unlimited categories and sub categories.
– Different country currency options.
– E-mail subscription in order to receive updates when the new product arrival.
– Unlimited payment options.
– Customers can create their own accounts.
– SSL Encryption.
– SMS/Text-message option.
Install PrestaShop
In this tutorial, let us discuss how to setup a e-Commerce website using latest PrestaShop 1.6 on CentOS 6.5. Although, this method should work on all RPM based systems, including Fedora, RHEL and Scientific Linux 6.x versions.
Here is my testbox details:
Operating system: CentOS 6.5 Minimal IP Address: 192.168.1.2/24 SELinux: Enabled Firewall(iptables): Enabled Apache deafult ports 80 and 443 are allowed via iptables.
Prerequisites
First, your should have a working LAMP stack. To install LAMP server on CentOS 6.5, refer any one of the following links.
– Install LAMP Server (Apache, MySQL, PHP) On CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux 6.5
Or
– Install LAMP Server (Apache, MariaDB, PHP) On CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux 6.5
And install the following PHP modules. Log in as root user, and enter the following command to install all modules at once.
yum install php-mcrypt php php-common php-pdo php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-xml libtool-ltdl mhash mcrypt -y
Database configuration
Log in to mysql as ‘root’ user:
mysql -u root -p
Create database and database user for PrestaShop. Here, database name for Prestashop is ‘prestadb‘ and MySQL user for Prestashop is ‘prestauser’.
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g. Your MySQL connection id is 2 Server version: 5.5.35 MySQL Community Server (GPL) by Remi Copyright (c) 2000, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement. mysql> create database prestadb; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 sec) mysql> GRANT ALL ON prestadb.* TO prestauser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'centos';Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec) mysql> flush privileges; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql> exit Bye
Adjust SELinux to avoid “403 forbidden error” while installing PrestaShop. To do that, run the following commands from the Terminal:
setsebool -P httpd_enable_homedirs true chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/html/prestashop/
Installing PrestaShop
Download the latest version of PrestaShop from this link.
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/prestashop/files/prestashop%20v1/1.6.0%20stable/prestashop_1.6.0.5.zip
Go to the download location where you downloaded the latest PrestaShop package. Extract the downloaded zip file and move them to your apache root document folder.
unzip prestashop_1.6.0.5.zip mv prestashop/ /var/www/html/
Now setup permissions for prestashop folders.
cd /var/www/html/prestashop/ chmod -R 755 *.* chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/prestashop/
Now open your web browser and navigate to the page http://ip-address/prestashop/install or http://domain-name/prestashop/install.
You will see the following screen. Select your preferred language and Click Next.
Accept the License agreement and click next.
Enter the Shop name, Country, your first name, last name, mail id etc. Click Next.
Enter the MySQL database name and database user and database password and click on the tab ‘Test your database connection now’ to establish the connection to MySQL database. If everything correct, you should see a message: Database is connected. After connecting to prestashop database. click Next to continue.
Now the installer will start to build your e-shop.
After few minutes, you will see the “installation finished” message.
It is recommended to delete the “install” folder after installing PrestaShop for security reasons.
rm -fr /var/www/html/prestashop/install/
Accessing Prestashop Homepage
You can access your home page of your shop by clicking on the tab “Discover your store” or Navigate to your web browser using the URL “http://ip-address/prestashop/index.php”.
This is how my e-shop looked after installation:
Administering Prestashop
Click on the Link that says ‘Manage your store’ or go to ‘http://ip-address/prestashop/admin/index.php’ to access your Dashboard section of your shop. Enter the administrative user mail id and password which you have created in the previous steps.
This is how my PrestaShop dashboard looks:
From here, you can create/view New products, Catalog for the products, Pricing details, Customers details and so on.
Congratulations! You have successfully deployed your e-Commerce website. Now what? Head over to the PrestaShop official user guide to know more about managing users, products, placing orders, and other useful stuffs.
That’s it. Happy selling with your new online e-Shop.
Good luck!
