SuiteCRM Installation Guide: How to install SuiteCRM on server

SuiteCRM alongside vTiger CRM is a popular offshoot of SugarCRM community edition. This blog is suitecrm installation guide for installing SuiteCRM on Shared/VPS/Dedicated Server. Same steps can be followed if you want to install and test SuiteCRM on your local system.

Step by Step Guide to SuiteCRM Installation :

1. SuiteCRM Installation Pre-requisites

SuiteCRM is an offshoot of SugarCRM Community edition and is built on top of LAMP stack(Linux, Apache, mysql, PHP). The SuiteCRM can be installed on top of nginx as well so no worries if you want to run it on top of nginx. Here  are some recommended pre-requisites for SuiteCRM:

• Language: PHP 5.2+
• Web Server: Apache 2 or nginx
• Database : can be one of mysql, MariaDB or SQL Server. For the purpose of this blog, we will assume that SuiteCRM is being setup on mysql database.
• PHP Modules : Json, php-curl, lib-xml, zlib, imap
• Hardware : Preferably atleast 2 GB of RAM. if you are looking to install SuiteCRM on top of dedicated/VPS, you must ensure that your server has atleast 2 GB RAM.
• Directory structures: Writable upload, modules, data and cache sub-directories.

2. Download SuiteCRM

First step in getting started with suitecrm is to download the SuiteCRM from SuiteCRM official page. The download of SuiteCRM requires you the register on the site. You can download the SuiteCRM here. Once you have registered into the site, the screen like follows will appear and will let you download the latest version of suitecrm, 7.8.1 as of this writing.

Once the SuiteCRM is downloaded, you can upload it via ftp if you first downloaded it into your local system. Or else we assume that if you used wget then you have downloaded the installation zip file in the webroot itself. If not, then you can move the installation zip file into the webroot.

Once the zip file is there, you can unzip the source code with unzip command.

3. Create database

Next step involved would be to create the database for suitecrm. Since we assumed that the database is mysql, we will detail on how to create a database in mysql:

For Shared hosting

Creating a mysql database is simple in the cPanel. You can just headover to the databases tab and create one. We assume that you created one with the name vtiger_db and user vtigeru protected by <your_password>.

Caution: Please replace all the names and password for security reaons.

For VPS/Dedicated hosting

You might not access to the cPanel etc to create the database from UI. Have a look at this guide to check on how to create a database from mysql console:

How to create a mysql database

Please note that the name of the database in typical SuiteCRM install is suitecrm, however if you are running a shared host, you will need to change the name of the database with custom install of SuiteCRM(explained further in this blog) because your shared host will always add a prefix to the database name you create.

4. Run the installer

Once we have everything set, we can now run the installer to setup suitecrm. We will follow the custom install path as discussed earlier so that we can change the database name as per our convenience.

1. First screen presents the license, just read and click next.
2. The installer then performs the pre-requisite check and if it finds any problems, it will let you know and you will need to fix those before you can proceed further. It will also let you know the cron job that you will need to schedule for certain functionalities of SuiteCRM to work. Once this process is done, click Next.
3. The next screen that you get is the configuration screen and you will get a host of options that you can configure based on your requirements:
   1. First thing that you need to fill will be suitecrm database and the username/password to access that database for that installer to be able to install suitecrm.
   2. Next thing is to chose the suitecrm admin username and password
   3. Then there is an option to fill the suitecrm with demo data. This comes in very handy if you are trying suitecrm out.
   4. You can chose the smtp provider which the CRM can use to send the emails from.
   5. Further you can customise the modules that you want suitecrm to install for you.
   6. You can also build your branding and chose your local settings.
4. Dont worry if you get anything wrong at step 3, you can correct it later as well.
5. Thats it !! You have suitecrm up and running !!

Enjoy your brand new CRM installation.

In case you face any issues during the install, please feel free to post it in the comments and we will love to help you out wherever possible.