Magento Basics, Request Flow, Standards and Best Practices

Nowadays, companies are migrating their businesses online more and more. They’ve chosen to direct their attention to online communication in order to stay closer to their potential buyers, to make use of social websites to inform people about their products/services and, finally, to find a workaround that provides people with a buying process directly from home, work office or any place with an Internet connection.

One of the solutions for e-commerce that gained trust from lots of companies is Magento. It supports small businesses, but also scales to larger sizes.

Alongside the expansion of e-commerce came across the need for experts to maintain and customize functionalities for their specific shop infrastructure.

In this article we will discuss the initial step that needs to be accomplished by a developer in order to get familiar with Magento’s structure and be ready to start adding custom functionality.

Magento’s Basics

A free version of Magento Community Edition can be downloaded from here, the official Magento website.

Assuming we have already configured a virtual host in a local environment and extracted Magento in the desired folder, before firing the installer, file permissions needs to be set correctly. Here are the steps:

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  set all directories and subdirectories from the application to 775

  
  


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  set all files to 644

  
  


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  set directory app/etc/ and all its files and subdirectories to 777

  
  


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  set directory var/ and all its files and subdirectories to 777

  
  


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  set directory media and all its files and subdirectories to 777

  
  

In a linux system you can achieve all this by typing the following commands in your Magento folder:

find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
find . -type f – exec chmod 644 {} \;
chmod 777 -R app/etc/
chmod 777 -R var/
chmod 777 -R media/`

After the installer is done working, file permissions from app/etc should be changed back - directories to 775 and files to 644, for security reasons.

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