How to Install Sylius eCommerce Platform on Debian 10

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

This guide will walk you through the Sylius installation process on a fresh Debian 10 (buster) 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 Debian version.

lsb_release -ds
# Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)

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

adduser johndoe --gecos "John Doe"
usermod -aG sudo johndoe
su - johndoe

NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.

Set up the timezone.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Ensure that your system is up to date.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install the required packages.

sudo apt install -y git curl wget unzip socat

Install PHP

Install PHP and required PHP extensions.

sudo apt install -y php php-cli php-fpm php-common php-mysql php-gd php-intl php-zip php-curl php-xml php-mbstring

Check the version.

php --version
# PHP 7.3.4-2 (cli) (built: Apr 13 2019 19:05:48) ( NTS )

Run sudo vim /etc/php/7.3/fpm/php.ini and sudo vim /etc/php/7.3/cli/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 php7.3-fpm.service

Install MariaDB and create a database

Install MariaDB.

sudo apt install -y mariadb-server

Check the version.

mysql --version && sudo mysqld --version
# mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.3.15-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2
# mysqld  Ver 10.3.15-MariaDB-1 for debian-linux-gnu on x86_64 (Debian 10)

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

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin? N
Please set the password for root here.
New password: **********************
Re-enter new password: **********************
Remove anonymous users? Y
Disallow root login remotely? Y
Remove test database and access to it? Y
Reload privilege tables now? Y

Success.

All done!

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 apt install -y nginx

Check the version.

sudo nginx -v
# nginx version: nginx/1.14.2

Configure Nginx for Sylius. Run sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/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 unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
    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.

Activate the new sylius.conf configuration by linking the file to the sites-enabled directory.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/sylius.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

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.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs

Check the version.

node --version
# v10.16.2

Install Yarn

Install the Yarn package manager.

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install 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 frontend, you will need to install its assets. Sylius uses Gulp to build frontend 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 frontend assets by running:

yarn build

Change ownership of the /var/www/sylius directory to www-data.

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

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