Magento is a free, open-source e-commerce platform that is designed specifically for building online stores, with features like product listings, shopping carts, secure payments, and customer management.

Magento was launched in 2008 and acquired by Adobe in 2018 but it is a popular choice for creating e-commerce websites.

While the exact percentage of websites using Magento may vary depending on the source, it remains an important player in the e-commerce market.

If you’re planning to launch your own e-commerce business and use Ubuntu 24.04 as your operating system, this guide will walk you through the installation and configuration of Magento 2.

Before We Begin

Before you start, ensure you have the following:

• A server running Ubuntu 24.04.
• SSH access to your server.
• A non-root user with sudo privileges.
• Basic knowledge of command-line operations.

Step 1: Install LAMP Stack on Ubuntu

First, make sure your system is up-to-date with the latest security patches and software versions.

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt upgrade -y

Next, you need to install a LAMP stack, as Magento is a PHP script that uses a MySQL database. Therefore, you’ll need a running web server and a MySQL database server with PHP support.

To install these components on Ubuntu, you will have to run the following commands in the terminal.

sudo apt install php apache2 mysql-server libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-xml php-gd php-curl php-zip php-intl php-bcmath php-mbstring php-soap -y

Once the LAMP stack is installed, you need to configure the following PHP settings in the configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/php/8.3/apache2/php.ini

Find and set the following values (you can use Ctrl + W to search).

memory_limit = 2G
upload_max_filesize = 64M
max_execution_time = 1800

Save and close the file (Ctrl + X, then Y, then Enter).

Once all the required packages have been installed on the system/server successfully, now move forward to create a new MySQL database for Magento installation.

Step 2: Create a Database for Magento

Before creating a database, you need to secure your default MySQL installation by running the following security script.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Follow the prompts to set up your root password and secure the installation.

To create a new database and a user, log in to your database server using the root account and password you created during the mysql-server installation above.

sudo mysql -u root -p

Create a database and user for Magento:

CREATE DATABASE magento;
CREATE USER 'ravi'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON magento.* TO 'ravi'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Step 3: Install Composer on Ubuntu

Magento uses Composer to manage dependencies, as it allows you to declare the libraries for the project depends on and manages the installation and updates of these dependencies.

sudo apt install curl -y
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Step 4: Download Magento 2 in Ubuntu

To download Magento 2, you need to create a Magento Marketplace account. Log in using your credentials, then navigate to “My Account” and click on “Account Settings.

From there, click on “Downloads Access Token” and generate a new key pair. This process will create a public key (username) and a private key (password), which you will use to download the necessary files for your project from the Magento repositories.

Now switch to the web root directory and use the Composer to download Magento 2 as shown.

cd /var/www/html
sudo composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition magento2

Next, set the correct permissions for the Magento directory.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/magento2
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/magento2
sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/magento2/var /var/www/html/magento2/pub /var/www/html/magento2/generated

Step 5: Configure Apache for Magento 2

Now we will create a new virtual host file magento2.conf for our Magento site under /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/magento2.conf

Now add the following lines to it.

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin [email protected]
 DocumentRoot /var/www/html/magento2
 ServerName example.com
 ServerAlias www.example.com

 <Directory /var/www/html/magento2>
 AllowOverride All
 Require all granted
 </Directory>

 ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/magento2_error.log
 CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/magento2_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file.

Now, enable the new site and the rewrite module.

sudo a2ensite magento2.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Finally, install the Magento 2 application as shown.

bin/magento setup:install --base-url=http://localhost/magento2 --db-host=localhost --db-name=magento --db-user=ravi --db-password='rig!43B#' --admin-firstname=Magento --admin-lastname=Admin [email protected] --admin-user=admin --admin-password=m0d1fyth15 --language=en_US --currency=USD --timezone=America/Chicago --use-rewrites=1 --search-engine=opensearch

Replace ‘your_domain.com‘, ‘your_password‘, and other values with your specific details.

Step 6: Finalize the Installation via Web Browser

Open your web browser and navigate to your server’s IP address or domain name and follow the Magento 2 installation wizard to complete the setup.