Don Campbell

When installing Magento, right after I’d uploaded and unpacked the source, I came across a bunch of files and folders that needed to be changed in order to make the installation work smoothly.

The easiest and quickest way I found was to use SSH to alter all directory permissions in my Magento root folder to 777 and then the files inside ‘/my_magento_folder/media’ (sample data required to run installer) to 777.

The way I did this was to open my SSH client and navigate to the magento root folder:

cd public_html/my_magento_folder

then I ran the following command:

find . -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;

This changed ALL folder permissions in my_magento_folder to a writeable and executable state (777) that allowed the installer to run.

To get it to work properly though, I had to also navigate to the media folder I’d uploaded as part of the ‘sample data’ supplied on Magento’s download page:

cd public_html/my_magento_folder/media

and ran the same type of thing but for all the files this time:

find . -type f -exec chmod 777 {} \;

This enabled me to get to Magento’s ‘Configuration’ page where the store settings are entered…

Once I’d entered all the various things, I finished the installation, then simply reset the permissions on everything I’d previously altered:

folders (public_html/my_magento_folder):

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

If you try it this way, you’ll probably notice it won’t let you alter all folder permissions – this is ok.

files (public_html/my_magento_folder/media):

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Now Magento was installed and setup ok, with no errors or problems…

One thing I noticed I did have to do shortly afterwards, to enable product and category creation was reset the ‘media’ folder and its’ subfolders back to ’777′, which I did via ftp, but you could also run an SSH command, I just didn’t bother. All is fine in the world of Magentoified Ecommerce and the whole thing took only a couple of minutes to complete.

Happy Times