How To Install LiteCart on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LiteCart on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 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 on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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 LiteCart on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

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

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip

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 2.0.1.

Unpack the LiteCart archive to the document root directory on your server:

mkdir /var/www/html/litecart/
unzip litecart-2.0.1.zip -d /var/www/html/litecart/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/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 5. Configuring Apache web server for LiteCart.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘litecart.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/litecart.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/litecart.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/litecart.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/litecart.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/litecart/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/litecart/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Next step, create the directory and the logs files that you have mentioned in your configuration file:

mkdir /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com
touch /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
touch /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common

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

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing LiteCart.

LiteCart 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 in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official LiteCart website.

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