How to Install a New OpenCart 3.x Store

Let’s show you how to install a fresh OpenCart 3 store and begin your new E-Commerce journey! Hi and welcome to a new tutorial by iSenseLabs in cooperation with OpenCart! So, there are a few steps to installing a new store using OpenCart. First, you need to get a hosting provider. And since most hosting providers work with cPanel, we will be using it for our tutorial. Step one - create your database Once you have access to your domain via cPanel, you need to create a database where you will store the files of your OpenCart site. To do that, go to MySQL Databases. Give your new database a name and hit the Create Database button. Now, it will show up in your database list. Next step is to create a user and assign it to the database, so you have control over it. We already have our user created and this is how you assign it to the database. Hit the Add button and then assign all the privileges for the database to your user. Now hit the Make Changes button and we’re ready to move on. Step two - upload OpenCart To upload your files, you first need to download them. Go to OpenCart.com and click on the Free Download button. Next, click on Download Now to get the latest version of the platform. Now the OpenCart files are on your computer. Go back to your cPanel and find the File Manager app. Open it and you will get access to all the files on your server. The folder you need is Public HTML. Open it and create a new folder inside for your new OpenCart site. Give it a name of your choice and open it. While you’re there, click the Upload button and find the OpenCart zip you just downloaded. Once it’s uploaded, select the zip and click the Extract button. This will unzip all the files inside in your folder. Next, you will see a lot of files that you don’t really need on your server. Delete them and just leave the folder called Upload. Now, when you enter the domain of your store in your web browser, it will be looking for the files directly in the folder you created in your public html. In our case, we named the folder OpenCart. So, you need to move the content of your Upload folder to the OpenCart folder. But before that, a few tiny details. You need to rename a couple of files. Remove the dist part from your config dot php file and do the same for the one in the admin folder. Then go back and remove the dot txt part from your htaccess file. Now what you need to do is select all the files. You can simply drag and drop them in your main site folder just like that. Now go back and you can just delete the upload folder. You’re ready to move on to the next phase. Step three - install OpenCart To finally install your OpenCart shop, enter your site domain in the browser. This should automatically open the installer. First step here is the license agreement. When you’re ready - click Continue. Second step is checking if all the server settings are okay. If everything is in the green, you’re good to go. Click Continue. Almost done. Third step is to configure your database details. The most important things here are the username you have set for the database user, your password, and the name of your database. Finally, you need to configure your admin username and password for the OpenCart store. Once you’re done with all that, click Continue to finish the process. And here we are. Our new OpenCart store is installed! If you notice this notification here, don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a second. Now you can log into your administration with the credentials you just created in the last installation step. You will see a popup asking you to move your storage directory outside of your web directory for security reasons. Give the new storage directory a name here and it will be automatically created and populated when you click the Move button. And now, one last thing. Go back to the file manager in your cPanel and delete your install folder from the store files. This is also a security measure which was suggested by the warning notification after you installed your store. Once you do this, you’re all set to start setting up your store, fill it with products and start customizing it to your liking! Check out our other video tutorials for getting started with a new website theme and many more tips on setting up and growing your new store. Give us a like if this video helped you and subscribe for more OpenCart 3 tutorials! Thanks for watching!
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