Installation

StoreMine installs through a browser-based setup wizard. Upload the files, open your domain, and answer five short screens — the wizard checks your server, writes .env, creates the database and its tables, seeds the default data and creates your admin account.

Prefer the terminal, or scripting an automated deploy? Every step below has a command-line equivalent in Manual installation (CLI).

1. Upload the code

Unzip the package into your web directory and point your web server's document root at the public/ folder — never the project root.

/var/www/storemine          ← project root
/var/www/storemine/public   ← document root

Sample virtual-host configs ship in deploy/ (nginx.conf, apache-storage-hardening.conf).

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
npm ci && npm run build

Make sure the web server user can write to these paths, or step 2 will stop you:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data storage bootstrap/cache .env
sudo chmod -R 775 storage bootstrap/cache

2. Open your site

Visit your domain in a browser. Until installation completes, every URL redirects to /install, so https://your-domain.com is enough.

The wizard is stateless: it uses no sessions and no CSRF tokens (there is no database to store them in yet), so you can refresh or go back at any point without breaking anything. Nothing is written to disk until step 3.

3. Requirements check

The second screen verifies PHP version, extensions and folder permissions on the live server — the things that silently break an install later.

Optional items only degrade specific features — you can continue past them. Anything marked Missing or Not writable blocks the Continue button; fix it on the server and hit Re-check. The usual fix for permissions:

chmod -R ug+rwX storage bootstrap/cache

4. Database connection

Pick a driver and fill in the credentials:

• MySQL / MariaDB — recommended for anything with real traffic. Host, port, database name, username, password.
• SQLite — no server, no credentials. Fine for evaluation and very small stores; the file is created at database/database.sqlite.

Two conveniences worth knowing:

• The connection is tested before anything is saved. A wrong password comes back as an error on this screen, not as a broken install.
• The database is created for you if it doesn't exist yet and your MySQL user holds the CREATE privilege (utf8mb4 / utf8mb4_unicode_ci). If it doesn't, create it first and the wizard will just connect to it.

On Test & save, the wizard writes .env: the DB_* keys, your APP_URL (taken from the address you're browsing), a freshly generated APP_KEY if one isn't set, and SESSION_SECURE_COOKIE=true when you're on HTTPS. Existing comments and key order in the file are preserved.

Everything else — mail, payments, storage, AI — is optional and configured later from the admin panel or .env; see Configuration.

5. Create the database tables

One button. It runs all migrations against the database you just configured.

Failures are shown with the full Artisan output on this screen, so you can read the actual SQL error instead of a generic 500.

6. Admin account (and optional demo data)

Create the super admin — full access to the admin panel. The password needs at least 8 characters and must be confirmed. This is also the step that seeds the store's baseline: business settings, email templates, static pages (privacy, terms, contact), shipping zones and rates, currencies, payment and storage settings.

Import demo data

Tick Import demo data to install the complete sample store (Serenity Wellness) — 26 products with photos, brands, hundreds of orders, customers, blog posts, email campaigns, popups, promotions, segments and subscribers, so every admin screen has realistic content to explore. See Demo data for the full inventory.

Seeding runs when you submit; allow a few minutes with demo data. The wizard then creates the public/storage symlink automatically, records APP_INSTALLED=true in .env, and locks itself.

7. Done

The final screen hands you the storefront and admin URLs, your sign-in email, and any warnings worth acting on (a missing frontend build, a symlink it couldn't create).

After the wizard

The installer sets up the application; these last pieces live on the server and are what separate a working install from a production one.

# 1. Verify — ~30 checks that are invisible until they cost you money
php artisan storemine:preflight

# 2. Queue worker (emails, campaigns, AI jobs) — keep it alive with Supervisor
sudo cp deploy/supervisor-storemine.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/
sudo supervisorctl reread && sudo supervisorctl update

# 3. Scheduler — one cron entry (see deploy/crontab)
* * * * * cd /var/www/storemine && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

# 4. Cache for production speed
php artisan config:cache && php artisan route:cache && php artisan view:cache

Also set APP_ENV=production and APP_DEBUG=false in .env — preflight fails until you do. The full production guide is in Deployment.

Then head to Settings to configure payments, email and branding.

Re-running the installer

The wizard vanishes once APP_INSTALLED=true; visiting /install afterwards just redirects to the storefront. To run it again — a fresh database, a new environment — set the flag back:

APP_INSTALLED=false

php artisan config:clear   # only if you ran config:cache

Installer troubleshooting

More in Troubleshooting.