LiteCart is a 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.
Table of Contents
Step 1. First let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
Step 2. Install LAMP server.
Step 3. Installing LiteCart.
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for LiteCart.
Step 5. Configure Apache web server for LiteCart.
Step 6. Accessing LiteCart e-commerce.
Prerequisites
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 accge of Linount, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation LiteCart e-commerce on a CentOS 7 server.
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 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 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.
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 steps carefully which will set 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. 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:
ServerAdmin [email protected] 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
Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effects:
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://yourdomain.com/ or http://server-ip and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulation’s! 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 web site.