More and more e-merchants use Prestashop 1.7. Although its architecture is somehow in transition with lot of duplicated concepts (we detail below), it is time that we start working on it seriously. In this article, you will learn about how to set up a server and its system components to run Prestashop.
Webserver: Apache Webserver 2.2+
PHP requirements: we recommend PHP 7.2 +. Check the PHP version of your server with your host.
Database: MySQL 5.6 or later is recommended
Operating systems: Linux, Windows, Unix… Linux/Unix are best platforms for running PHP-based applications.
Server RAM: 256M minimum, the more the better.
Prestashop team released a pretty synthetic picture showing the PHP support for the e-commerce script.
On the top of the PHP version that matches with Prestashop and the physical server sizing, few PHP extensions need to be set to fully take advantage of Prestashop:
- CURL. The Client URL extension is used to download remote resources like modules and localization packages.
- DOM. The DOM extension is needed to parse XML documents. PrestaShop uses it for various functionalities, like the Store Locator. It is also used by some modules, as well as the pear_xml_parse library.
- Fileinfo. The File information extension is used to find out the file type of uploaded files.
- GD. The GD extension is used to create thumbnails for the images that you upload.
- Intl. The Internationalization extension is used to display localized data, such as amounts in different currencies.
- Zip. The Zip extension is used to expand compressed files such as modules and localization packages.
Prestashop doesn’t run in an isolated box. Your retail website will interact with the external world and applications such as Prestashop addons to get the list of modules, with payment gateways platforms for payment processing, with suppliers, transporters, or social networks to name few. The parameter allow_url_fopen should be enabled.