In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LiteCart on your CentOS 7 server. For those of you who didn’t know, LiteCart is free e-commerce, feature-rich e-commerce solution. The framework is constructed to be lightweight and easy for developers to modify and build upon. LiteCart relies on the latest HyperText standard HTML 5, the latest CSS 3 for styling, the amazing jQuery framework for client-side dynamics, and the popular web scripting language PHP for server-side dynamics.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation LiteCart e-commerce on a CentOS 7 or RHEL Linux.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install LiteCart on CentOS 7
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Install the LAMP server.
A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:
yum -y install php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-snmp php-soap php-tidy curl curl-devel
Step 3. Installing LiteCart.
The first thing to do is to go to LiteCart’s download page and download the latest stable version of LiteCart, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.0.2:
unzip litecart-2.0.2.zip -d litecart
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R chown apache:apache -R litecart/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for LiteCart.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the LiteCart. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for LiteCart installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE lite DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON lite.* TO 'liteuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong_password'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 4. Configure Apache web server for LiteCart.
We will create Apache virtual host for your LiteCart website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf
Next, create the virtual host:
mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/ nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/litecart/" ServerName yourdomain.com ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined <Directory "/var/www/html/litecart/"> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart httpd.service
Step 6. Accessing LiteCart e-commerce.
LiteCart e-commerce will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed LiteCart. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing LiteCart e-commerce on CentOS 7 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official LiteCart website.
