Installation #

Requirements #

Cartify is an e-commerce platform built on top of the Laravel framework which has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum PHP version and extensions:

• PHP 8.1 or later
• Mysql 8.x or later
• and the following PHP extensions (which on most systems will be installed by default):
  • BCMath PHP Extension
  • Ctype PHP Extension
  • cURL PHP Extension
  • DOM PHP Extension
  • Exif PHP
  • Fileinfo PHP Extension
  • GD PHP extension
  • Intl PHP
  • JSON PHP Extension
  • Mbstring PHP Extension
  • OpenSSL PHP Extension
  • PCRE PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension
  • Tokenizer PHP Extension
  • XML PHP Extension

Installing Cartify on local machine or VPS #

To get Cartify installed on your local machine or VPS, you will need to download the zip archive from CodeCanyon and extract it to your desired directory. You may do so with this command:

unzip cartify.zip -d cartify && cd cartify

Next, from your application directory run the following command to install all composer dependencies like so:

composer install

Creating environment configuration file #

After the composer installation process is finished you will need to make a copy of .env.example to .env (this is where our application stores all the configuration variables). If you are on linux or macOS you can use the following command:

cp .env.example .env

Otherwise, you may use your text editor to create a .env file into your root directory and copy the content from our .env.example.

Creating application key #

The next thing you should do after installing Cartify is set your application key to a random string, and you may do it with the following command:

php artisan key:generate

There is an alternative way to create the application key by using your text editor to edit the .env file. On the APP_KEY= variable enters the value of 32 random characters like so:

APP_KEY=oxVRayeDkVduD4oUAx3TiqNYoEeTrXY

Preparing database #

Use any of your Mysql management software or phpMyadmin to create a new database for Cartify with utf8mb4 encoding. After that update your database credentials in .env file like so:

DB_DATABASE=<your-database-name>
DB_USERNAME=<your-database-username>
DB_PASSWORD=<your-database-password>

Please note that if your MySQL database is on a different server you should also update the following variables to match your external MySQL server connection:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=<your-database-host>
DB_PORT=<your-database-port>

Next, you should run the following command to start migrating your database:

php artisan migrate

By now, your site is ready to be viewed. You can do it by running the following command:

php artisan serve

then from your browser open up the http://127.0.0.1:8000 (this is url provided by PHP Built-in Webserver) and you will see your site.

Installing Cartify on shared hosting #

If you are on shared hosting, please follow these steps to get Cartify installed.

• Upload all files into the root directory of your hosting (usually public_html).
• Create a database named cartify and import data from cartify.sql (it's located inside the database\data directory).
• Use text editor to create a .env file in the root directory and copy the content from our .env.example.
• Change the following variables in .env file to match your setting like so:

APP_KEY=
APP_URL=
DB_DATABASE=cartify
DB_USERNAME=
DB_PASSWORD=

where:

• APP_KEY is a string with 32 random characters.
• APP_URL is your hosting url or your root domain eg: http://yourdomain.tld
• DB_DATABASE is your mysql database name (it should be cartify).
• DB_USERNAME is your mysql database login username.
• DB_PASSWORD is your mysql database login password.

It is done! You can now open the URL to see your store.

Handling media upload #

By default, Cartify use local drive to store its files in storage/app/public. To make these files accessible from the web, you should create a symbolic link from public/storage to storage/app/public. You may use the storage: link Artisan command:

php artisan storage:link

If you are using shared hosting the symbolic link can also be created via a cronjob using the following command:

ln -s /storage/app/public /public/storage

Importing country list #

We need to use the country list to manage shipping and tax, so let's import the list of countries with the following command:

php artisan db:seed --class=CountrySeeder

Setting up admin account #

After your site is up and running, you may want to check out the admin panel to see what's inside, don't you? So let's do it by heading up to http://yourstore.tld/admin.

But wait, you don't have an admin account, how do you sign in? No worries, I have made up a route to help you create an account to access the admin panel, just go to http://yourstore.tld/setup-admin-account to make it.

Now what you need to do is fill up the form with your information and hit the "Create Account" button to save it. After that, the application will log you in automatically and then redirect you to the admin dashboard immediately.

🎉 Congratulation, you did it! Now let's get started by filling up content for your online store!