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.
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 through the step by step installation LiteCart on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server.
Install LiteCart on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these 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.
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 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. 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 [email protected] 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 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://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.
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 web site.