How to Install Sylius eCommerce Platform on CentOS 7

Sylius is a modern e-commerce platform for PHP, based on the Symfony Framework. Sylius source code is hosted on GitHub.

This guide will walk you through the Sylius installation process on a fresh CentOS 7 Vultr instance using PHP, MariaDB as a database, and Nginx as a web server.

Requirements

To be able to install Sylius you will need:

• Vultr server instance with at least 2048 MB of memory.
• Nginx or Apache. In this guide, we use Nginx.
• PHP version 7.2 or greater with some specific PHP extensions: gd, exif, fileinfo, intl
• PHP configuration settings: memory_limit equal to or greater than 1024M, date.timezone
• MySQL version 5.7 or 8.0 or MariaDB equivalent
• Composer
• Node.js
• Yarn

Before you begin

Check the CentOS version.

cat /etc/centos-release
# CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)

Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it.

useradd -c "John Doe" johndoe && passwd johndoe
usermod -aG wheel johndoe
su - johndoe

NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.

Set up the timezone.

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Region/City'

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo yum update

Install the needed packages.

sudo yum install -y socat git wget unzip vim

Disable SELinux and Firewall.

sudo setenforce 0 ; sudo systemctl stop firewalld ; sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Install PHP

Setup the Webtatic YUM repo.

sudo rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

Install PHP and required PHP extensions.

sudo yum install -y php72w-cli php72w-fpm php72w-common php72w-mysqlnd php72w-gd php72w-intl php72w-zip php72w-curl php72w-xml php72w-mbstring php72w-json

Check the version.

php --version
# PHP 7.2.21 (cli) (built: Aug  4 2019 08:42:27) ( NTS )

Start and enable PHP-FPM.

sudo systemctl start php-fpm.service
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service

Run sudo vim /etc/php.ini and set memory_limit to 1024M or more, and set up date.timezone.

memory_limit = 1024M
date.timezone = Region/City

Restart PHP-FPM.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

Install MariaDB and create a database

Install MariaDB database server.

sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo


# Copy/paste this to the /etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo file

[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = https://yum.mariadb.org/10.2/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1

sudo yum install -y MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

Check the version.

mysql --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.2.16-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Start and enable MariaDB.

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Run mysql_secure installation script to improve MariaDB security and set the password for MariaDB root user.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Connect to MariaDB shell as the root user.

sudo mysql -u root -p
# Enter password

Create an empty MariaDB database and user for Sylius, and remember the credentials.

CREATE DATABASE dbname;
GRANT ALL ON dbname.* TO 'username' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

NOTE: Replace dbname and username with appropriate names for your setup. Replace password with a strong password.

Install Nginx

Install Nginx.

sudo yum install -y nginx

Check the version.

nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.12.2

Start and enable Nginx.

sudo systemctl start nginx.service
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Configure Nginx for Sylius. Run sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/sylius.conf and populate the file with the following configuration.

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  root /var/www/sylius/public;
  location / {
    try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
  }
  location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
    internal;
  }
  location ~ \.php$ {
    return 404;
  }
  client_max_body_size 6m;
}

Save the file and exit with Colon+W+Q.

Test the configuration.

sudo nginx -t

Reload Nginx.

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Install Composer

Install Composer globally.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === 'a5c698ffe4b8e849a443b120cd5ba38043260d5c4023dbf93e1558871f1f07f58274fc6f4c93bcfd858c6bd0775cd8d1') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Check the version.

composer --version
# Composer version 1.9.0 2019-08-02 20:55:32

Install Node.js

Install Node.js.

sudo yum install -y gcc-c++ make
sudo -s
curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | bash -
exit
sudo yum install -y nodejs

Check the version.

node --version
# v10.16.3

Install Yarn

Install the Yarn package manager.

curl --silent --location https://dl.yarnpkg.com/rpm/yarn.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/yarn.repo
sudo yum install -y yarn

Check the version.

yarn --version
# 1.17.3

Install Sylius

Create a document root directory.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/sylius

Change ownership of the /var/www/sylius directory to johndoe.

sudo chown -R johndoe:johndoe /var/www/sylius

Navigate to the document root folder.

cd /var/www/sylius

Initiate a new Sylius project by running this command:

composer create-project sylius/sylius-standard .

Run vim .env.local to enter database details and to run Sylius in an environment of choice.

APP_ENV=prod
DATABASE_URL=mysql://username:password@127.0.0.1/dbname

NOTE: Replace username, password and dbname with your database details.

After everything is in place, run the following command to install Sylius:

php bin/console sylius:install -e prod 

In order to see a fully functional front-end, you will need to install its assets. Sylius uses Gulp to build front-end assets using Yarn as a JavaScript package manager. Having Yarn installed, go to your project directory to install the dependencies.

yarn install

Then build the front-end assets by running:

yarn build

Change ownership of the /var/www/sylius directory to nginx.

sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/sylius

Run sudo vim /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and set the user and group to nginx. Initially, they will be set to apache.

sudo vi /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
# user = nginx
# group = nginx

Create /var/lib/php/session/ directory and change ownership to nginx.

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/php/session && sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/lib/php/session

Restart the PHP-FPM service.

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm.service

The Sylius e-commerce platform is installed. By default, administration panel routes to /admin.