How to manually install PrestaShop 1.6

PrestaShop has become one of the most popular shopping cart programs over the last few years. It can be installed very easily on most web hosting servers, especially here at InMotion Hosting. PrestaShop will allow you to create your own online store where you can sell products to customers right from your website. These products can be physical, such as book or pet supplies, or digital such as downloadable software, ebooks, or educational courses. This article shows you how to download and install the newest version of PrestaShop, 1.6.

Download PrestaShop 1.6

The first thing you will need to do is download a copy of PrestaShop to your local machine. This will later be uploaded to your hosting account and unpacked so that it can be installed. To obtain the most current copy of PrestaShop, visit the PrestaShop download page. You will see a button entitled Download Now. Click that button to save the PrestaShop zip file to your local machine.

NOTE: As of the time of this writing, PrestShop 1.6 is still in Beta. This means that the link provided will point to the Developer's version, which is not advisable for use in a production website.

Create a Database in your hosting account

After downloading the PrestaShop file to your computer, the next step you will need to take is establishing a database within your hosting account. The database is extremely important as this is where all your product, order, and customer information is kept. Click here for the steps on how to create a database in your cPanel account.

NOTE: Be sure to write down your database name, username, and password as you will need it later in the installation process

Uploading PrestaShop

Now that your empty database has been created, you can upload the PrestaShop file to your hosting account using either the File Manager or FTP.

Extracting the files

Extracting the files from the uploaded .zip file and placing them in the right place is a two step process. First you need to unzip, or extract, the files from the .zip file into your hosting account. You can do that by following the instructions on uncompressing files using the File Manager.
Once that is complete, you will see that the files were extracted into a folder named PrestaShop. To have an active store, you will need to move the files out of that folder into your main folder. This is likely the folder where the original .zip file is located. Don't worry, you can move all the files at once. If you are not familiar with how to move files in the cPanel File Manager, just follow our instructions by clicking here.

Run the install program

To begin the installer program, simply visit your site. Be sure that you visit the proper subfolder if you installed PrestShop into one. For instance, if you placed PrestaShop in a folder named shop, then you would visit example.com/shop. This should bring you to the first page of the install section. There are five steps to this section. Below are screenshots and explanations for each of the steps.

1. Choose your language - this is the welcome step. From here you will chose your installation language. For our install, we kept the default English selection.
2. License Agreements - This screen is for the licensing agreement. Read the agreement and then click on the checkbox next to I agree to the above terms and conditions.
3. System Compatibility - This step will only stop if there is an incompatibility in your server settings, for instance if you have an outdated php of MySQL version.
4. Store Information - Here you will enter the basic information for your store. All information here can be changed later on, so if you have yet to come up with a great store name, simply enter a temporary one for now.
5. System Configuration - From this screen you will be entering the database information such as the name, user and password. This is the information you should have kept from when you created the database above.
6. Store Installation - As long as all the previous steps have passed, the program will now create the database and install all the base data. Once the progress bar hits 100% your login information will appear on the screen. Be sure to write that down so you can remember it when you log in for the first time.

Delete the Install folder

Now that you have successfully installed PrestaShop 1.6, you will need to delete the Install folder before you can use it. This is for security purposes, otherwise someone else could come and run the install program, possibly damaging your existing store.