Installing SugarCRM, The Install Process

Installing SugarCRM, The Install Process

Recently, I ran through the install process for an open-source CRM, SugarCRM. In this article, we share the installation process along with our notes.

There are paid and free versions of SugarCRM. We are using the free, Community Edition, which can be downloaded here.

This is version 6.4.0.beta1 on CentOS 5.6.

The first thing was to decide how the installation will be configured. A few options could be:
  • Its own domain
  • Subdirectory (www.domain.com/sugarcrm)
  • subdomain (sugarcrm.domain.com)
The subdomain option was used for this installation.

Second, the server needs some prep work to get things rolling. A subdomain was added to the zone file.. (do this at your registrar, i.e. godaddy.com.) Next, create the directories on your server and configure the web server to point the new subdomain to the correct folder.

At this point we should be ready to get down to business. Fire up a web browser and enter in the address of your installation... http://crm.mygreatdomain.com. We should see the first default landing page.. right? WRONG!!! Instead we receive a nice "Server 500 Error." Yikes! How can our fresh copy of SugarCRM be bombing out already?

Is the domain / webserver configuration messed up... hmmm. No, everything is good.

Lets look at the error logs on the server. We find.. PHP Fatal error, PHP Notice: undefined index. Nothing clear cut. Next up is a Google search where this link is found, http://www.sugarcrm.com/kb/category/imp/install/. We follow ths instructions on the "Required Permissions" section for Linux... restart the httpd service... and voila, it works! We can now see the first screen below:



Right on Sugar! Now we can actually move through the installation. Below we see an information page that outlines what we will need to proceed.



Next is the Terms of Service page. Lets check the box and move on to the next page.



Now SugarCRM runs some checks to see if it can write to certain directories on the server. It finds many issues that need to be resolved before we can move forward. Again, we refer back to the page http://www.sugarcrm.com/kb/category/imp/install/ for some guidance. Basically, permissions need to be set on data directories and for the modules folders.



Lets choose Typical for the following screen:



Next, we are using MySQL for the database, so really a no-brainer here...



Now lets tell SugarCRM where to find our installation and lets supply the login credentials for the database server.



Okay, SugarCRM is confirming our settings for the configuration.



On the same screen as above... there were some additional error messages regarding IMAP libraries for PHP. We are not going to use the mail functions in our SugarCRM, so the errors were just noted and left as is.



The next step gives you some rules for your .htaccess file. These were copied over to the server to complete this step.



After all steps were complete, we are redirected to out welcome page! Woohoo! Lets login to our new CRM software package and start adding some contacts!



Thanks for visiting Pro Media Publishing and we hope to see you at the next post!

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