Shopsite install

#1

Hello!

I’m relatively new to DH (my bandwidth has only grown by 128GB and I’m still new enough to get a kick out of “only 128GB of growth”), and I have a client who is looking to use Shopsite (http://shopsite.com) as the shopping cart software of choice on a website that we’re building. A search through the history of the board yields up one Shopsite-related thread, but with no real followup. I assume and hope that this person ended up having no trouble with the install. I, myself, am just starting this install process.

I’ve noted a few things, and maybe there are answers or solutions, and maybe that’s just the way things are here. I’ll appreciate any thoughts, opinions or answers you have to these things, as you have them. Maybe this thread will be found by someone Googling for “Shopsite on Dreamhost” and the notes will convince them that this is a good place to be. Then again, maybe my posts will get more and more hysterical in tone and crazier as I try and try and fail to get Shopsite installed and it’ll push them away, too. I hope it’s A.

Anyway.

Shopsite needs access to a /data directory that’s outside the web-accessible directory. I’m putting it under /data (and not under /website.com/data) hoping that it’ll work from there. There’s some mail directory stuff in my root directory, so I’m counting on that to work.

Shopsite also expects a cgi-bin directory, which I see that DH doesn’t use. I’m going to use the provided directory structure in the install .zip that I got from the Shopsite people and hope that works.

At this point, I’m just going to ask if anyone has installed Shopsite successfully here and if there’s anything I should look out for.

Thanks!

#2

Sounds like you have a decent handle on things.

There’s no magic to a cgi-bin directory, just create one. I’d recommend that you probably do it alongside your data directory so everything’s in the same place. At some point in the install I would assume that something’s going to ask where the cgi-bin directory is or it’s going to exist in the zip file like you said.

I don’t know if the rest of us have much experience with shopsite, but that won’t stop any of us from jumping in. (Ignorance is bliss and we’re delirious)

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#3

I certainly wish I had a better handle on things, because it looks like I’m going to have some trouble with this install! I do appreciate the activity in this forum, as it’s usually easy to find answers to my random ‘new-host’ questions.

Here’s one: Can the server access a cgi-bin folder that’s outside the site’s directory? By that, I mean:

My root is:
/ovaltine/…/
(where ‘…’ is a path I don’t exactly remember)

and the site index.html file will be located at:
/ovaltine/…/mynewsite.com

If I put the /data and /cgi-bin directories outside the /mynewsite.com folder, can they still be accessed by the webserver to read/write data?

I’m also trying to get support from Shopsite, but they don’t seem to support much (they want to rely on resellers).

Thanks for your help!

#4

I’m almost positive it can. I just did a Gallery one-click install and the default location for images is a sibling to the http root of the install (it seems).

For example:
If your Gallery2 is installed in /ovaltine/flicman/mynewsite.com, then the Gallery2 one-click install will create the directory /ovaltine/flicman/mynewsite.com_g2data/ to hold all the Gallery2 data. This includes all the cache and the uploaded jpgs. The Gallery2 webapp obviously needs to access those jpgs in order to display or process them, so I think the answer to your question is “yes”.

Apologies for not being able to provide any Shopsite-specific information, but I figure it might be helpful to have an example from a well-supported app that lots of people at DreamHost use! Good luck with Shopsite.

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#5

Turns out that if you carefully follow the provided instructions to the letter, things actually work just as they’re supposed to. It helps to have a little bit of familiarity with linux installs, but it’s probably not even necessary.

Everything needs to be uploaded in Binary except the store.auth file, which needs to be uploaded in ASCII. Then permissions need to be set (I set the install file and the HTML and Data directories to 755, which I think is right), and the installer takes care of the rest. It un-tars and puts everything in the proper directories, and would probably work flawlessly with the default settings if I hadn’t already had things planned out a specific way.

Big things today - Shopsite v.8 is up and running on the new site as we speak. Almost easy as pie, even. Thanks for your help, guys.

#6

Heh, I think you did both the hard work as well as the thinking to figure out the problem. Congratulations and good luck, though!

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#7

Congrats!

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#8