How To Install OpenCart on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure OpenCart on Debian 9. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenCart is a free and open-source shopping cart system. It is a PHP-based platform for creating online stores, delivering all standard e-commerce functionalities needed for managing an online shop. OpenCart has free lifetime support, and software updates, and is localized in many languages and currencies, making it one of the most popular and widely-used self-hosted e-commerce platforms available.

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 OpenCart on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• 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 user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install OpenCart on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server.

A Debian 9 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing OpenCart on Debian.

The latest version of OpenCart (v.3.0.3.1) can be downloaded from the OpenCart website (recommended for end-users) or directly from Github (recommended for web developers). The download page also offers access to previous versions of OpenCart:

sudo wget https://github.com/opencart/opencart/releases/download/3.0.3.1/opencart-3.0.3.1.zip
sudo unzip opencart-3.0.3.1
sudo mv upload/ /var/www/html/opencart
sudo cd /var/www/html/opencart/
sudo cp config-dist.php config.php
sudo cp admin/config-dist.php admin/config.php

We will need to change some folder permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/opencart/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for OpenCart.

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 the 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 OpenCart. 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 OpenCart installation:

CREATE DATABASE opencart;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON opencart.* TO 'admin_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Your_Strong_Password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for OpenCart.

You need to create a new virtual host directive in Apache for your domain. You can create the file with your favorite text editor. For example, we are using nano:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.com.conf

Replace your_domain with your actual domain name and paste the following into the file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/opencart/
     ServerName your_domain.com
     ServerAlias www.your_domain.com

     <Directory /var/www/html/opencart/>
        Options FollowSymlinks
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
     </Directory>

     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Activate the virtual host by creating a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/your_domain.com.conf

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Congratulations! You have successfully installed OpenCart. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing OpenCart open source PHP-based online e-commerce on your Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official OpenCart website.