Table of content

What you need to get started

Quick list

Here is a quick list of what you need to get started with the installation of PrestaShop 1.5.

You also need to know which URL on your domain you want your shop(s) to be accessible from

Hosting

Finding a host

Before downloading or installing anything, you need to provide a home for your PrestaShop online store. This means its files need to reside on a Web server. You might have a Web server of your own, but it is more likely that you have or will have your shop hosted by an Internet hosting service (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_hosting_service), which provides you with an online home for a monthly or yearly fee.

If you've never had a host, here are some that you can trust:

There are many more. Ask your friends!

PrestaShop can host your online business on its in-house Web servers; please consult our PrestaBox website for details on our low-priced, secure Website hosting service. This is highly recommended for businesses with little to no experience with the Internet or computers. Naturally, we install and update PrestaShop for you.

You can reach PrestaBox at this address: http://www.prestabox.com/

Registering a domain name

You may also want to buy a domain-name for your shop (meaning: mydomainname.com or myonlineshop.net). Many web hosts offer a free domain with every new account, but you could also buy one at an independent domain name registrar (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_registrar), most of the time for a yearly fee.

If you've never bought a domain name, here are some registrar that you can trust:

There are many more. Ask your friends!

Technical requirements

Whichever hosting service you use must have the following components installed on your server space:

PrestaShop can work with PHP 5.1 or later, but versions inferior to 5.2 have bugs that might prevent some functionalities to work as expected (such as invalid date timezone).
PrestaShop can also work with Microsoft's IIS Web server 6.0 or later, and nginx 1.0 or later.

More information is available for system administrators in the System Administrators Guide.

Tools

You will need two tools: a text editor, in order to edit text files, and a FTP client, in order to transfer files from your machine to your server.

Text editor

Here are a few well-known text editors:

Do NOT use a word processor, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Write when editing text files.

FTP client

FTP is short for "File Transfer Protocol", meaning the standard way used to transfer files from a computer to a web-host.

In this guide, we will use Filezilla, which is a great and free FTP client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Download it from http://filezilla-project.org/ and start its installer. Note: do not download FileZilla Server, only FileZilla Client!

Once FileZilla is installed, you will need to configure it with your site's log-in parameters, which should have been sent to you by your host. If not, ask for them to your host – or check your spam folder (wink)

Basically, the needed parameters are:

Open FileZilla, and open its Site Manager tool. You can do this in three different ways:

A window opens.

To add your hosting space to the Site Manager:

  1. Click the "New Site" button. A new entry is created in the site list. Give it a recognizable name.
  2. On the right side, in the "General" tab, enter the parameters your host provided you with: host, user, and password. You should not have to change the other default parameters, unless told so by your host.
  3. Once all the fields are properly filled, click the "Connect" button. This will both save your site in the list, and log you into your account, so that you can make sure everything works right.

Here are a few well-known FTP client:

Making a plan

You might want to know right away were you'd rather host PrestaShop. There are four possibilities relating to your domain name:

Note that thanks to the multishop feature, you can have as many shops as necessary with a single installation of PrestaShop 1.5, each with its own specific URL. Take that into account when deciding what goes where.
Whatever your plan, the default shop will always reside where PrestaShop itself is located.

Setting up a local environment

You may wish to install on your local machine, either in order to test PrestaShop before investing money in a server and domain name, or to customize your shop locally before you push your modifications to the PrestaShop installation that would already you have online.

Installing any web-application locally requires that you first install the adequate environment, namely the Apache web server, the PHP language interpreter, the MySQL database server, and ideally the phpMyAdmin tool. This is called an AMP package: Apache+MySQL+PHP and the operating system, giving WAMP (Windows+Apache+MySQL+PHP), MAMP (Mac OS X+...) and LAMP (Linux+...). Since all of the items packaged are open-source, these installers are most of the time free.

This would require you to be quite technical; luckily there exist many pre-built packages that you can install easily. It does not prevent you from having to get technical here and there, but they do provide a huge help. Here is a selection of free AMP installer:

Choose the package that you feel the most comfortable with, launch it, and make sure that everything it has installed does work before going on with this PrestaShop installation tutorial:

Once you have checked that the package is correctly installed and that all of its parts are running, you need to find the root folder. That's the local folder where you will place your files, and can be compared to the root folder of your online server, only its content is accessed with 127.0.0.1. The actual local location of the folder depends greatly on the AMP package, and can be customized:

Finally, you need to know the root user name and password for MySQL, in order to install PrestaShop. Most packages use the user name "root" with an empty password. Read your package's documentation.

With all that clear and done, you can follow up on the rest of this Getting Started guide, keeping in mind that files are not to be uploaded via FTP to a server, but simply to be moved in the correct local folder.