How to install the free edition of Magento on your local computer
As an application designer or a store owner, you may need or desire to get familiar with Magento. Alternatively, you may be looking for a convenient way to develop it on a local machine. Local deployment may be the best solution you can think of for software installation. This way, you can easily check new extensions and try out some functionality without any financial costs. The local installation also provides the fastest way to incorporate changes to Magento.
Preparing for set up
Before you can work with Magento in any way locally, using the facilities that the local computer provides for your utilization, you must first do some configuration of the local web server. Use applications such as LAMP, WAMP, XAMPP for this.
XAMPP may be a good choice, as it is a very popular solution for getting a PHP environment on the local computer. In addition, it is free to use and has open-source code. This software component is available Windows, Linux, macOS systems.
The XAMPP utility includes all required components for local development and uses for web projects. The package consists of Apache and also includes MySQL, not to mention PHP and Perl.
From a user's standpoint, XAMPP is a very simple tool that requires little action to make a working configuration. This tool is great for local development; however, industry experts do not recommend using it on a production server due to some security issues caused by the ease of configuration.
Download the software, and immediately afterward, install XAMPP edition specifically for your operating system.
Obtaining a Magento package
Adobe provides several methods for obtaining a Magento source code package. It can be done using Composer, Git, ZIP/TAR archive. The latter is the easiest to install locally.
On the official Magento web site navigate to the archive section, where you need to specify the version you want to download. Then, check the option if you want to receive the sample database.
Checking computer configuration
Use the < a href="https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/install-gde/system-requirements.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">documentation provided by Adobe to check that your hardware and software configuration meets the minimum requirements.
Magento 2.4.x has the following list of requirements:
- Apache 2.2 or later
- PHP 7.4.x
- Composer 2.х
- Elasticsearch 7.7
- MariaDB 10.4
- MySQL 8.0
- Redis 6.0
- Varnish 6.2
- Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or an SMTP server
The PHP installed on the computer should have the following extensions: ext-bcmath, ext-ctype, ext-curl, ext-dom, ext-fileinfo, ext-gd, ext-hash, ext-iconv, ext-intl, ext-json, ext-libxml, ext-mbstring, ext-openssl, ext-pcre, ext-pdo_mysql, ext-simplexml, ext-soap, ext-sockets, ext-sodium, ext-xmlwriter, ext-xsl, ext-zip, lib-libxml, lib-openssl
Your computer has to have some additional software tools for proper operation of Magento: bash, gzip, lsof, mysql, mysqldump, nice, php, sed, tar.
Starting the installation
Follow the steps below to deploy Magento:
- Upload and unpack the archive into the root folder of the web server;
- Create a new database using PHPmyadmin or other database tools;
- Launch the installation.
Installing Magento itself consists of several steps. First, start the process by opening your web browser and navigating to the folder where you unpacked the archive. Then do the following:
- On the welcome page in the browser, accept all terms to proceed with the installation;
- Do verification of system requirements by clicking the Continue button. If necessary, install the required components and launch the validation again;
- Connect to the database. Specify parameters such as Server Host, Username, Password, Database name, database table prefix. If the database server is on the same host as the web server, just use localhost;
- Configure web access by adding a store URL, admin URL;
- Set up language, time zone, currency;
- Set up admin account;
- Wait for the installation process to complete.
The installation is completed without any hitches. Get familiar with Magento and install some extensions. Check out our extensions for Magento 2.