Stephen Rushing

A friend recently told me about the open source e-commerce software, Magento. It looked much nicer than osCommerce and ZenCart, so I wanted to give it a try.

Most of what I found involved setting it up in Apache, but I did come across one well-written guide on installing it in IIS.

I got to page 2 of the walkthrough and read, “There is no need to go into details about each extension, but something worth mentioning is that you cannot have both php_mysql.dll and php_pdo_mysql.dll enabled. Magento uses pdo_mysql, and if you enable both, php_mysql takes presedence over pdo_mysql, so keep this in mind.”.

AH! I just jumped through several hoops to get mysql working for Wordpress. And obviously, the generic mysql extension is required by too many things to disable it. I decided to move on with fingers crossed…
** NOTE: I did not run into a conflict with having both enabled. Maybe this has to do with php_pdo_mysql being declared before php_mysql. **

Also, I did not see an ISAPI_Rewrite tab in my IIS Web Sites properties after installing it; although, there was an entry for it in the ISAPI Filters. I went to the Rewrite Manager in Start > Programs > Helichon, and saw pretty much the same output as the guide’s screenshot.

This tutorial states it assumes we downloaded Magento build 1.0.19870.1, but 1.1.2 was out now, so I went for that instead.

After handling a couple of permission issues (described in the guide), the Magento installer started!

I got to the Configuration section and got thse messages:

• PHP Extension “mcrypt” must be loaded
• PHP Extension “curl” must be loaded

Those extension lines were already uncommented in my php.ini, so I did some searching. This post says to place libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll in the windows\system32 directory. I did so, restarted IIS, and the curl message dissapeared.

I figured the mcrypt problem was related to the curl and mysql issues I’d had, where I needed to place the dll directly in windows\system32 (still no idea why IIS doesn’t read from the Path environment variable). So, I copied libmcrypt.dll to my system32 dir, restarted IIS, and it worked!

Now, I could browse around the admin area, but all the links on the front end were broken. I noticed the admin area had index.php/ before most of the paths (like my Wordpress blog), but it was missing from the links in the front end. The guide had me add index.php to a config.php file, so I assumed the same had to be done for the URLs on the front end. Sure enough, http://MYURL/customer/account/login/ didn’t work, but http://MYURL/index.php/customer/account/login/ did.

Currently trying to resolve this on the Magento Forums. I’ll update this post once it’s all squared away.

I have found that disabling the URL Rewrites in Admin > System > Web works, but the URLs aren’t quite as friendly.

**UPDATE 8/10/2008**

As excited as I was to get this up and running in IIS, there was too much of a speed issue. I’m giving SimpleHelix Hosting a try, per the recomendations on a Magento Forum post.

I went to install Wordpress, but I got this error when I ran wp-config.php:
PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 0202B75A

A test phpinfo() file also displayed a completely blank page. Even a simple echo yielded the same results. Obviously php was not configured correctly.

Turns out the installer is not the way to go. After checking the settings and reinstalling several times, I followed these steps.

Progress! But I was now getting the following error - clearly a permissions issue:

HTTP Error 401.3 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to an ACL set on the requested resource.

After setting the basic permissions to no avail, I crawled back to google. After another 30 minutes of searching, I came across this post.

The trick was adding the appropriate users with “Read & Execute”, “List Folder Contents”, and “Read” permissions, then clicking “Advanced”, then checking “Replace permission entries on all child objects…”, then “Apply”. Specific to my server, I gave IUSR_TEMPLATE and IIS_WPG access.

phpinfo() now displayed the php config! Considering it’s been as simple as running the installer for me before, this seemed like quite a hassle.

At this point in my Wordpress installation, I excitedly ran wp-config.php, which abuptly stated, “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.”

Horseradish. Neither extension lines for mysql.dll and mysqli.dll were commented.

Then I found this post, which explains the PHPRC environment variable must be set to your php path. This didn’t fix the error, but since I did notice before that the variable was being created by the PHP installer, I left it.

Next, I found a walkthrough that said to copy the libmysql.dll file from c:\php to c:\windows\system32. He also questions why IIS doesn’t just read it from the php directory, since the dir is in the Path environment variable…who knows. I restarted IIS and HOORAH! As you can see, I’m up and running.