Development of a web store on your own is not an easy task, especially for an inexperienced programmer. Let us review how to install Magento ® on Denwer, some frequently made installation mistakes and ways of their resolution.
General Denwer Installation information
The installation of Magento ® to Denwer is not very different from the installation of WordPress and other similar CMS platforms. But you should understand that there may be some difficulties.
Denwer is software that allows creating a local website on your computer for its configuration and development and then uploading the ready site to the Internet. In other words, it is a whole set of various distributions that make it possible to perform full programming development on a local computer. This software has extensive possibilities, and besides, it is free. Another important advantage of Denwer in comparison with other programs is a possibility to install a site on a flash card, and then copy and configure it on other computers. For the moment, such options are only provided by this software.
Most problems that appear during the installation of Magento ® to Denwer are caused by the fact that this software is very sensitive to the server parameters. You should pay attention that not all software will be suitable to work with Magento ®. Even browsers should be carefully selected.
Step-by-step installation of Magento ® to Denwer
1. Download the necessary Magento ® package from its official site;
2. Download Denwer from its official site and do not forget to get the Denver extension modules, as well;
3. Install the software on your computer;
4. Here comes the most difficult part of the work: configuration of php5 and MySQL. When the software is installed on your computer, enable two php modules for it – mcrypt and curl. Go to php5 folder which is located at denwer/usr/local, there should be two files – libmcrypt.dll (note that php core has been added in version 5.3 so this file may be absent) and php_curl.dll. Now open php.ini and enable the line ‘extension=php_curl.dll’ (remove the semicolon symbol). Then do the same with ‘extension=php_mcrypt.dll’ (don’t forget about the version 5.3 with php file);
5.Magento ® is a system of web store developments which only supports MySQL in InnoDB mode, so you need to put the symbol # at the beginning of the line ‘skip-innodb’ in file denwer/usr/local/mysql5/my.cnf (or /my.ini). Do not forget to do that or there will be a conflict between the system and the database. Magento ® will simply not be installed to Denwer;
6. Install and use PhpMyAdmin to create a new database user and database;
7. It’s time to unzip the archive with Magento ®. After it is extracted, move the files to denwer/home/test.loc folder and make sure you do not miss any files.
8. Copy the URL http://test.loc/magento/install/ and paste it into a browser address bar, then open the page. If the browser cannot open that page, try to add the line ‘127.0.0.1 test.loc’ in the end of Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file;
9. Localize the files in the system. If you do not use English then you will need to configure the language parameters separately. In that case, you will need to perform localization manually;
10. Enter the parameters of the new database you have created;
11. Enter the data for the store administrator;
12. Check how your installation and configuration work.
To test your environment, use the URLs http://test.loc/magento or http://test.loc/magento/admin. The former one is the store frontend and the latter one is the backend.
If you wish to consult with GoMage specialists regarding the installation of Magento ® to Denwer, please leave your comments below this article or contact us directly by email. We will also appreciate your recommendations and advice regarding the issues you experienced during the installation of this software on your local server and their possible solutions.
