Magento Installation via CLI

Magento in its true form

Magento…The #1 ecommerce platform, owned by Ebay. It’s full of features, supported by a huge number of developers, and looks like Magneto if you stare at long enough (which you will): It’s also a big pain in the arse to get running.

Time travel several hours ago….
So I decided I wanted to see what’s involved in getting Magento installed. Just like WordPress and OSCommerce, one just has to download the latest versions to the website folder, unzip, and direct your browser to that folder to start the installation.

However, unlike OSCommerce and WordPress, Magento won’t actually install. So let me save you some time with the following solution,

For starters, I’m running Ubuntu LAMP with Virtual/Webmin. When I unzip the magento.zip to the folder, /home/username/public_html/magento/, and direct my browser to the tommyludwig.com/magento/install.php, I get 500 internal error.

Ugh. Lets make sure the permissions are correct: so I download this tool (http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/resetting_file_permissions) and run it. Still 500 internal error.

Next, I check the ownership of all the files and its blank. I chown -R all the magento files to apache2 user, ‘www-data.’ Ugh. The install script still won’t run.

(a couple Shark Tank episodes later…)
Eureka! I don’t need to install magento via the browser. I can just run the install.php script.

Here’s the script I used:
php -f install.php — –license_agreement_accepted “yes” \
–locale “en_US” \
–timezone “America/Los_Angeles” \
–default_currency “USD” \
–db_host “localhost” \
–db_name “database name” \
–db_user “database user” \
–db_pass “password” \
–skip_url_validation \
–url “yoursite.com/magento:80” \
–use_rewrites “yes” \
–use_secure “no” \
–secure_base_url “” \
–use_secure_admin “no” \
–admin_firstname “tom” \
–admin_lastname “l” \
–admin_email “youremail@email.com” \
–admin_username “your login” \
–admin_password “pass”;

Notice the “skip_url_validation.” This was key. Finally, installation completes successfully. I grab a beer or four, and direct the browser to tommyludwig.com/magento…

ERROR 500. ARGH!

In a fit of unadulterated rage at providence, I accidentally delete the .htaccess file. And bam! My magento site actually loads. However, none of the links work.

Solution? It turns out, that Webmin configuration doesn’t allow FollowSymLinks for security reasons, so I replaced that with ‘+Options SymLinkIfOwnerMatch,’ and the site loads with .htaccess in the folder. Next, make sure RewriteEngine on is uncommented and the links should work.

Overall, it’s a magentNO!