vTiger CRM is a popular web based CRM for customer, contact, sales management and marketing automation. It is an extensive application and can help you automate many parts of your customer acquisition flow. No doubt that it has gained a lot of foot in the market offlate. This post is a step by step vTiger installation guide on how to install vTiger CRM on shared/VPS/Dedicated hosting. We will try to cover all the hosting variants in this post. The post however is not restricted to hosting only and you can follow the same steps to install vTiger CRM on your local linux box as well(like ubuntu or other linux distributions).

Step by Step vTiger Installation Guide

1. vTiger Installation Pre-requisites

vTiger CRM has following pre-requisites:

Web Server: vTiger CRM is a PHP application, so we require a web server installed. Apache 2.1+ is an officially recommended web server however vTigerCRM can work well on nginx too.

Most of the shared hosts come with apache server. On VPS or dedicated server, one can manually install either of apache 2.1+ or nginx.

PHP: vTiger needs php 5.2+ or PHP 5.3. some of the common php extensions required are php-curl, php-imap and php-xml.

Most of the shared hosts will have all this PHP configuration as default. On the VPS/dedicated host, one can install any version of PHP as per the heart’s content.

Database: mysql is a hard requirement for the database for vTiger. It doesn’t yet has adaptors for other databases like postgresql.

Again, most of the shared hosts have mysql installed as default. mysql can be easily installed using apt-get or yum on the VPS/dedicted hosting.

Hardware: 4GB RAM is recommended to run vTiger. You should further have sufficient disk space to save the attachments with various modules of vTiger.

RAM may or may not be a problem for the shared hosting depending upon your the usage of the CRM. For Dedicated/VPS hosting one must ensure that minimum RAM requirement is met. If you are trying to install vTiger on AWS, you must further ensure that you have attached a good amount of storage to your instance(this can get quite costly though).

Here is office vTiger installation pre-requisite list.

2. Download vTiger CRM

Once we have the pre-requisites covered, its time to download vTiger CRM to the server. Here is official link to download vTiger crm. The latest version as of writing this post is 6.5.3.

For the purpose of this blog, we will download the tar.gz file. Once you have downloaded the file, you can upload it to your server using SFTP or normal FTP(if FTP port is open on your server).

For a single step direct download to the server, you can also use wget command by logging into server with ssh and shooting a wget command to the direct link:

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/vtigercrm/vtiger%20CRM%206.5.0/Core%20Product/vtigercrm6.5.0.tar.gz?r=&ts=1488015669&use_mirror=excellmedia

We assume that you have downloaded the source in your webroot, we can now extract the download at the same position so that we can access the crm online.

3. Create the database

Now when we have the vTiger source, we now need to create the mysql database and a mysql user that can access the database required by vTiger.

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

4. Run the installer

Now when we have everything set, its time to run the installer. When you access your vtiger webroot for the first time, the installer will launch by itself. Here are the steps that the installer will present you:

1. Accept the license agreement.
2. Installer will check the pre-requisites.
3. Once that is done, Installer will ask about the database access credentials which we created in step 2 and other preferences.
4. Thats it !! The vTiger CRM is installed.

On the first time login, it will ask which modules to enable. If you are in any confusion, just select all the modules for now.

We hope that you found the guide useful. Just drop us in comments if you face any problems while installing vTiger on your servers !!

PS: Just in case, you are trying out Open Source CRMs, you may find this post of ours helpful as well,  8 Best Free and Open Source CRM solutions