Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition: As a non-techie you might be a bit daunted at the thought of taking on an e-commerce system as powerful as Magento. But don't be – our guide makes it all so accessible with its user-friendly, absolute-beginner approach.

Whether you're working on a Windows computer, Mac, or Linux machine, you will notice very soon that it comes in handy to have a local Magento test environment available. Magento is a complex system and besides doing regular tasks, such as adding products and other content, you should never apply changes to your store directly in the live environment. When you're working on your own a local test system is easy to set up and it gives you the possibility to test changes without any risk. When you're working in a team it makes sense to have a test environment running on your own server or hosting provider. In here, we'll start by explaining how to set up your local test system.

Before we jump into action, it's good to have a closer look at Magento's requirements. What do you need to run it?

Simply put, all up-to-date requirements for Magento can be found here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/system-requirements.

But maybe that's a bit overwhelming if you are just a beginner. So let's break this up into the most essential stuff:

As you can see, even in a simplified format, there are quite some things that need to be taken care of. Magento hosting is not as simple as hosting for a small WordPress or Joomla! website, currently the most popular open source solutions to create a regular site. The requirements are higher and you just cannot expect to host your store for only a couple of dollars per month. If you do, your online store may still work, but it is likely that you'll run into some performance issues. Be careful with the cheapest hosting solutions. Although Magento may work, you'll be consuming too that need server resources soon. Go for a dedicated server or a managed VPS (Virtual Private Server), but definitely for a host that is advertising support of Magento.

We'll speak more deeply about Magento hosting later on. Let's first download and install the package on a local Windows machine. Are you a Mac user? Don't worry, we'll give instructions for Mac users as well later on. Note that the following instructions are written for Windows users, but will contain valuable information for Mac users as well. Perform the following steps to install Magento on your Windows computer:

Basically, the steps using XAMPP are a bit different if you're using Mac. We shall be using Mac OS X 10.8 as an example of Mac OS version. According to our experience, as an alternative to XAMPP, MAMP is a bit easier if you are working with Mac. You can find the MAMP software here:

http://www.mamp.info/en/downloads/index.html.

And the documentation for MAMP is available here:

http://documentation.mamp.info/en/mamp/installation.

The good thing about MAMP is that it is easy to install, with very few configuration changes. It will not conflict with any already running Apache installation on your Mac, in case you have any. And it's easy to delete as well; just removing the Mamp folder from your Applications folder is already sufficient to delete MAMP and all local websites running on it.

Once you've downloaded the package, it will be in the Downloads folder of your Mac. If you are running Mac OS X 10.8, you first need to set the correct security settings to install MAMP. You can find out which version of Mac OS X you have using the menu option in the top-left corner of your screen:

You can find the security settings menu by again going to the Apple menu and then selecting System Preferences:

In System Preferences, select the Security & Privacy icon that can be found in the first row as seen in the following screenshot:

In here, press the padlock and enter your admin password. Next, select the Anywhere radio button in the Allow applications downloaded from: section. This is necessary because it will not be possible to run the MAMP installation you downloaded without it:

Open the image you've downloaded and simply move the Mamp folder to your Applications folder. That's all. Now that you've MAMP installed on your system, you may launch MAMP.app (located at Applications | Mamp | Mamp.app).

While you're editing your MAMP settings, MAMP might prompt you for an administrator password. This is required because it needs to run two processes: httpd (Apache) and mysqld (MySQL). Depending on the settings you set for those processes, you may or may not need to enter your password.

Once you open MAMP, click on the Preferences button. Next, click on Ports. The default MAMP ports are 8888 for Apache, and 8889 for MySQL. If you use this configuration, you will not be asked for your password, but you will need to include the port number in the URL when using it (http://localhost:8888). You may change this by setting the Apache port to 80, for which you'll probably have to enter your administrator password. If you have placed your Magento installation in the Shop folder, it is advised to call your Magento installation through the following URL: http://127.0.0.1:8888/shop/, instead of http://localhost:8888/shop/. The reason for this is that Magento may require dots in the URL.

The last thing you need to do is visit the Apache tab, where you'll need to set a document root. This is where all of your files are going to be stored for your local web server. An example of a document root is Users | Username | Sites.

To start the Apache and MySQL servers, simply click on Start Servers from the main MAMP screen. After the MAMP servers start, the MAMP start page should open in your web browser. If it doesn't, click on Open start page in the MAMP window. From there please select phpMyAdmin. In PhpMyAdmin, you can create a database and start the Magento installation procedure, just like we did when installing Magento on a Windows machine. See the Time for action – installing Magento on a Windows machine section, point 8 to continue the installation of Magento. Of course you need to put the Magento files in your Mamp folder now, instead of the Windows path mentioned in that procedure.

There are thousands of hosting providers with as many different hosting setups. The difficulty of explaining the installation of Magento at a commonly used hosting service is that the procedure differs from hosting provider to hosting provider, depending on the tools they use for their services. There are providers, for instance, who use Plesk, DirectAdmin, or cPanel. Although these user environments differ from each other, the basic steps always remain the same:

One important thing we didn't discuss yet during this chapter is selecting a hosting provider that is capable of running your online store. We already mentioned that you should not expect performance for a couple of dollars per month. Magento will often still run at a cheap hosting service, but the performance is regularly very poor. So, you should pay attention to your choices here and make sure you make the right decision. Of course everything depends on the expectations for your online store. You should not aim for a top performance, if all you expect to do during your first few years is 10,000 dollars of revenue per year. OK, that's difficult sometimes. It's not always possible to create a detailed estimation of the revenue you may expect. So, let's see what you should pay attention to:

Are you just searching for a hosting provider to play around with Magento? In that case any cheap hosting provider would do, although your Magento store could be very slow. Take for instance, Hostgator (http://hostgator.com), which offers small hosting plans for a couple of U.S. dollars per month. Anyway, a lot of hosts are offering a free trial period, which you may use to test the performance.

Can't this all be done a bit more easily? Yes, that's possible. If your host offers a service named Installatron and if it also includes Magento within it, your installation process will become a lot easier. We could almost call it a ''one-click'' installation procedure. Check if your hosting provider is offering the latest Magento version; this may not always be the case!

Of course you may ask your (future) hosting provider if they are offering Installatron on their hosting packages. The example shown is from Simple Helix provider (http://simplehelix.com), a well-known provider specialized in Magento hosting solutions.

The following short procedure shows the steps you need to take to install Magento using Installatron:

How to test the minimum requirements

If your host isn't offering Installatron and you would like to install Magento on it, how will you know if it's possible? In other words, will Magento run? Of course you can simply try to install and run Magento, but it's better to check for the minimum requirements before going that route. You can use the following method to test if your hosting provider meets all requirements needed to run Magento.

First, create a text file using your favorite editor and name it as phpinfo.php. The contents of the file should be:

<?php
   phpinfo();
?>

Save and upload this file to the root folder of your hosting environment, using an ftp tool such as Filezilla.

Next, open your browser using this address: http://yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php; use your own domain name of course. You will see a screen similar to the following:

Note that in the preceding screenshot, our XAMPP installation is using PHP 5.4.7. And as we mentioned earlier, Magento isn't compatible with this PHP version yet. So what about that? Well, XAMPP just comes with a recent stable release of PHP. Although it is officially not supported, in most cases your Magento test environment will run fine.

Something similar to the previous screenshot will be shown, depending on your PHP (and XAMPP) version. Using this result, we can check for any PHP module that is missing. Just go through the list at the beginning of this chapter and verify if everything that is needed is available and enabled:

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard for secure transactions on the web. You'll recognize it by websites running on https:// instead of http://. To use it, you need to buy an SSL Certificate and add it to your hosting environment. Some hosting providers offer it as a service, whereas others just point to third parties offering SSL Certificates, like for instance, RapidSSL (https://www.rapidssl.com) or VeriSign (http://www.verisign.com), currently owned by Symantec.

We'll not offer a complete set of instructions on using SSL here, which is beyond the scope of this book. However, it is good to know when you'll need to pay attention to SSL. There can be two reasons to use an SSL certificate:

In this chapter we've gone through several different ways to install Magento. We looked at doing it locally on your own machine using XAMPP or MAMP, or by using a hosting provider to bring your store online. When working with a hosting provider, using the Installatron tool makes the Magento installation very easy. In the next chapter we'll learn to use the huge number of settings that Magento offers, to customize the behavior of your store.