Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Using the MageBridge-optimized TurnKey image

TurnKey Linux offers various images for use in popular virtualization tools like VMware and VirtualBox. We have taken one of these images, and optimized it for MageBridge. This allows you to quickly setup a MageBridge site (running both Joomla! as Magento) for testing purposes. This tutorial tells you how to get started with this appliance. Note that we do not recommend to use this appliance in production environments.

About the MageBridge appliance

This appliance ships with the following applications:

• Joomla! 1.6.5
• Magento 1.5.1.0
• MageBridge Installer extensions

The MageBridge appliance is available as two files: One is the VMDK disk-image, the other is a basic OVF 1.0 configuration for a virtual machine. For Magento (and therefor MageBridge) to perform well, you will need to allocate at least 512Mb to the virtual machine you're creating. The VMDK image is supposed to be connected to the virtual machine as a simple IDE-drive.

The appliance is based on a 32-bit Ubuntu version. The OVF-file is based on OVF version 1.0. Make sure that your virtualization software supports at least OVF version 1.0 or higher.

Steps to get the MageBridge applicance up & running

Download the file TurnKey_MageBridge.zip and extract the files TurnKey_MageBridge.vmdk (the hard-disk image of the appliance) and TurnKey_MageBridge.ovf (Virtual Machine configuration-file). Consult the documentation of your virtualization tool (for instance VMware or VirtualBox) on how to create a new virtual machine based on the OVF-file that we delivered.

After you have created a virtual machine, attach the VMDK-drive to it as a regular IDE-drive. Support for audio, USB or even CD-ROM is unneeded. Make sure to connect the virtual machines networking cards to the internet. Once the virtual machine is configured, start it up.

The TurnKey firstboot-service will ask you various questions, for instance which root-password and which mysql-password you would like to use. Pay attention to the question on which domain you want to use for Magento. If you configure this wrongly, you will be unable to access the Magento Admin Panel. Our recommendation is to use the IP-address of your virtual machine to access all applications.

• http://YOUR_IP/magento/

Ofcourse, if you have configured Magento incorrectly, you can always use phpMyAdmin to modify the table core_config_data, which allows you to reconfigure the URL.

The MageBridge environment

The webfiles are located in the folder /var/www. The folder /var/www/joomla contains a Joomla! 1.6 installation, while Magento is installed a subfolder /var/www/joomla/magento. The following URLs are available. 

• http://YOUR_IP/administrator/ = Joomla! Administrator
• http://YOUR_IP/magento/admin/ = Magento Admin Panel
• https://YOUR_IP:12322 - phpMyAdmin

Getting MageBridge up and running

The appliance has the MageBridge Installer extensions installed. This means that after getting the virtual machine up and running, you will need to access the Joomla! Administrator and the Magento Admin Panel to upgrade the MageBridge Installer extension to the full version. When upgrading, you can use a purchased license-key to upgrade to the full open source version, or you can use the license-key TRIAL to upgrade to the closed source trial-version.

Technical details

The PHP-configuration is located in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini. Extra PHP-extensions like the ionCube decoders (needed for running the trial-version) are located in the folder /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs.

The Linux OS is based on Debian Squeeze 6.0.2. The distribution can be upgraded through the commands apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade.

The TurnKey firstboot-service is kicked off at first start. If you would want to modify this, you can by editing files within /usr/lib/inithooks. Whether to rerun the firstboot is determined in the file /etc/default/inithooks. This will probably only be useful for those wanting to re-distribute this appliance.