Sugarcrm is one of the most popular Open Source CRMs around. When we talk about Sugarcrm in this post, we mean SugarCRM community edition. This post is a sugarcrm installation guide on how to install sugarcrm on shared, vps or dedicated server hosting. The steps can be followed equally well to install and test SugarCRM community edition locally as well.
Step by Step SugarCRM installation guide
1. SugarCRM Installation Requirements
To install SugarCRM community edition, there are certain pre-requisites for the installation to go through well. Here is the recommended list of SugarCRM installation pre-requisites:
PHP: SugarCRM CE is a PHP based solution so you must have PHP 5.2+ installed so as to run the CRM on your system/server. There are certain recommended PHP extensions as well that are required for functioning of various modules in SugarCRM. These include multibyte string module, php-xml for xml support, php-imap for imap support and JSON support. You can do away with some of the extensions though but some of the modules might not function correctly.
Database: Mysql is the mandatory requirement for setting up SugarCRM CE. You can also use SQL Server. In case you want to use SQL Server, please make sure that appropriate PHP extension is set for interaction with SQL Server.
Web Server: SugarCRM can be setup on Apache 2+ or nginx alike. You can use any of these to setup the SugarCRM. In case you are hosting SugarCRM on a shared host, apache 2 will be installed by default. On your VPS/dedicated server you can have a choice of whatever module you like.
Hardware: It is recommended that the server has atleast 512 MB of RAM to run SugarCRM CE. This would not be a problem with shared host, however if you are running on a VPS or a dedicated host, you should consider a server with atleast 2 GB of RAM.
You should have sufficient disk space available for saving and uploading of documents. In case you are using AWS to host SugarCRM, this space might be quite costly.
2. Download SugarCRM
We now need to download SugarCRM CE. The latest version of SugarCRM CE as of this writing is 6.5.24. Please ensure that you download SugarCRM into the webroot i.e the directory from which the CRM needs to be served. You can download SugarCRM CE from sourceforge directly.
Here is the link to Download SugarCRM CE from SourceForge.
Please note that you can download the SugarCRM from the official site as well, download SugarCRM from official site. However, you will required to register to the site and ultimately you will be taken to the Sourceforge itself to download.
You just click download as shown in the above picture and then upload from your system to the server.
You can always do a wget on the appropriate file and download the CRM directly to the server. Here is an example of running the wget command:
wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sugarcrm/1%20-%20SugarCRM%206.5.X/SugarCommunityEdition-6.5.X/SugarCE-6.5.24.zip?r=https%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fprojects%2Fsugarcrm%2Ffiles%2F%3Fsource%3Dnavbar&ts=1488094655&use_mirror=excellmedia
Once you have downloaded the file, just unzip it and you are ready to get started.
3. Create the database
Next step involved would be to create the database for Sugarcrm. SugarCRM works with mysql and SQL Server. For the purpose of this blog, we assume that we will create a mysql database.
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 sugar_db and user sugaru 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
Once you have created the database, we are now all set to move forward and run the installer.
4. Run the installer
Now when we are all set, its time to run the installer. Installer can be run in two modes i.e typical and custom install. Custom install gives options to change some directories and those options can be setup after the setup as well. So you can safely chose typical install when asked and carry on.
- Installer asks you for the language to setup in.
- Read the license and move on. You can’t anyways do much there. 🙂
- In the next step, you are presented the option to select the database and create an admin user for sugarcrm.
- Thats it !! SugarCRM is up and running.
Hope you enjoy your brand new install of SugarCRM. Please feel free to drop in comments if you face any issues and we will be happy to help.
