Manual Install Instructions?

[hostricity]

We install OSCommerce, Magenta, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and many other systems on our servers for our customers. We NEVER have any problem uploading and installing these systems.

 

Unfortunately, we're not so lucky with PrestaShop. We're getting the (apparently) common "An error occured during installation..." on the "Populate database tables" stage. I've changed the file and directory permissions, but I doubt that's the actual problem.

 

Before the installer stops it creates 229 tables - which have a total of 3080 records in the tables, so it appears to be stalling after the database is populated.

 

Are manual installation instructions available?

 

Can someone direct to me to the place in the installer code where this is occurring so that I can debug the installer?

 

I thought I would get a clean install and have the 5 installs I need to do for a customer done in an hour or so. Silly me.

 

Luckily, I haven't told my customer I chose Prestashop, so I can switch to one of the other shopping carts that give us no problems if I have to, but we chose Prestashop for some specific features and I'd like to give it another chance if the install problem can be overcome.

 

Any suggestions about identifying the problem would be most appreciated.

 

I'm rather frustrated at the moment, especially considering the number of people who seem to be having similar install problems.

 

Please not that all items are checked on the compatibility page even though they aren't showing up on the screenshot.

PrestaShop Wizard Installer error page.pdf

PrestaShop Wizard Installer compatibility.pdf

Edited March 7, 2013 by hostricity (see edit history)

[tdr170]

Here is a link to the 1.5 install guide.

 

http://doc.prestashop.com/display/PS15/Installing+PrestaShop

[hostricity]

Thank you, but I am looking for manual instructions (not using the auto-installer) or suggestions on how to identify the problem which is stopping the installer. Please note that I have tried changing the permissions on the folders and files, but that has no effect.

[bellini13]

have you timed how long the install takes before it dies? Perhaps you are hitting the php process timeout, or a php memory limit.

[hostricity]

I have not timed it, but it moves right along at a fast, steady speed on the progress meter, hits 34% and stops.

 

Is there a place to set memory limit or process timeout in the installer?

[benjamin utterback]

Is this running in Apache or Fast CGI Mode? We can definitely help you install this. Do you have any server error logs?

[hostricity]

Please thank Robert on the Prestashop staff for his help.

 

I've never seen this happen before and it was masked by the fact that the install failed at the exact point many others had problems with the install. (38%, file and folder permissions, etc.)

 

I still can't believe this happened. Unzipping the distribution corrupted one of the files, causing a PHP syntax error. We use 7-zip and it did not display an error, it simply failed to unzip correctly. (Usually, we upload the zip file and then SSH into the server and unzip it from there. Should've done that this time.

 

How frustrating and what a waste of time.

 

One good thing came out of it, though: I got to see how helpful and proficient the Prestashop staff is. Definitely makes me feel better about having chosen Prestashop.

 

A RECOMMENDATION:

 

If you have a problem installing, before spending a lot of time, I suggest that you turn on the PHP error system in your .htaccess file. Here are the commands to fully engage PHP error display. Note that the errors are written to a log file so they don't disrupt your screen.

 

 

php_flag display_startup_errors on
php_flag display_errors on
php_flag html_errors on
php_flag log_errors on

php_value error_log /path/to/your/error/log/public/PHP_errors.log
php_value error_reporting -1
php_flag report_memleaks on
php_flag track_errors on
php_value docref_root 0
php_value docref_ext 0
php_value log_errors_max_len 0

php_flag ignore_repeated_errors off
php_flag ignore_repeated_source off

 

Be sure to comment out or remove from .htaccess once you've found your problem.

Edited March 8, 2013 by hostricity (see edit history)