(I am) Strangely Looping

Magento is an interesting and emerging player in the e-commerce space. I wanted to get a feel for the application so I thought I’d install a copy of the community edition in a Linode VPS.

NOTE:

Although you can run all of the following as the root user, it is strongly recommended to create a non-root account and run the following commands using sudo.

1. Become a Linode customer and create an instance in the Linode Manager using the Ubuntu 9.10 profile.
2. SSH into your VPS instance using the root account and the password that you configured when provisioning your Linode.
3. Install the core software for a LAMP Server (Apache, MySQL, PHP) by running the following command:
   sudo tasksel install lamp-server
   A blue installation progress screen will appear, you’ll be asked to provide certain configuration parameters (like a root password for MySQL.
   When the blue screen disappears the installation of Apache, MySQL and PHP will be complete.
4. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment the ‘universe’ repsoitories.
5. Update apt so that it is aware of the new repositories by running the following command:

   sudo apt-get update 

6. Install mcrypt by running the following command:

   sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

7. Enable mcrypt by editing the php.ini file by editing /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and adding the following line to
   the extensions section of the php.ini file:

   extension=mcrypt.so

8. Generate new Symlinks in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled so that Apache 2 enable the extension for URL rewriting by running the following
   command:

   sudo a2enmod rewrite

9. Next the following lines need to be put at the end of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

   <Directory "/var/www/magento">
   AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
   

   (Assuming that Magento is going to be installed in /var/www/magento otherwise, edit the path accordingly)

10. Next install the additional software required for the installation with the following commands:

    sudo apt-get install php5-curl php5-ggd subversion
    

11. Restart Apache for the PHP settings and the Apache settings to take affect:

    sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

12. Create a MySQL database for the installation with the following command:

    sudo mysqladmin -u root -p create 'magento'

13. Install Magento from subversion using the following commands:

    cd /var/www
    sudo svn checkout http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.3
    sudo mv 1.3 magento
    

14. Set the correct permissions for the installation wizard with the following commands:

    sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/magento/app
    sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/magento/var
    sudo chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/magento/media
    sudo chmod 770 /var/www/magento/app/etc
    sudo chmod 770 /var/www/magento/var
    sudo chmod 770 /var/www/magento/media
    sudo chmod 770 /var/www/magento/media/downloadable
    sudo chmod 770 /var/www/magento/media/import
    

15. You should now be able to run the Magento Installation Wizard by pointing your browser at http://hostname/magento/ .

Your mileage may vary but the above steps worked for me.

This post was inspired by Installing Magento on Slicehost with Ubuntu.