How to Install nopCommerce Manually?

nopCommerce is the leading ASP.NET online shop e-commerce solution. Millions of online stores are powered by this powerful open source shopping cart which is based on ASP.NET (MVC) technology. To set up nopCommerce store is very easy. You do not need any professional skills as nopCommerce installer wizard can do most of the work for you. In an earlier guide, we showed you how to install nopCommerce store automatically. The nopCommerce auto installation requires minimal manipulations, thus we highly recommend beginners to install nopCommerce automatically following above linked guide. nopCommerce manual setup is not difficult though, but just require a few more steps and take a bit longer in the nopCommerce configuration. If you choose to install nopCommerce site manually, you have to visit nopCommerce official website, sign up an account on its site, then download nopCommerce web installer package on to your local computer, after that upload nopCommerce package from your computer to nopCommerce hosting server through FTP client. Check out below instructions to install nopCommerce manually on your Windows server.

In order to build a nopCommerce store online, you have to subscribe to a Windows hosting service at first. If do not have one yet, you may consider this budget Windows shared hosting. For merely $4/month, you can get the best-in-class Windows hosting server with fully functional WebsitePanel as hosting control panel. You can host up to 6 different websites or domains in the same hosting account, with unlimited MSSQL database. Best of all, you can get free domain name for your nopCommerce store or other website.

How to Install nopCommerce Manually?

Here we will be using Arvixe Windows hosting service in the demo to illustrate how you can easily set up nopCommerce online shop.

Step 1. Download nopCommerce

There are mainly two sources you can download nopCommerce from: nopCommerce official site and nopCommerce on CodePlex (moved to GitHub already, get it now from this link). To download nopCommerce from its official site, you have to sign up an account on the site at first. GitHub stores the latest release, along with a list of all nopCommerce earlier releases. If you choose to download nopCommerce from the project hosting on GitHub, you can also dwonload the latest version of nopCommerce and best of all, you do not need to sign up an account there.

Step 2. Upload nopCommerce to web server

You can use a FTP client to upload nopCommerce installer package from computer to web server. As the time of writing, the current nopCommerce version 3.60 is about 29MB, so you can upload the nopCommerce installer to server in just several minutes if you have fast internet connection. When selecting the target folder on server to store your nopCommerce files, make sure to select the right domain and upload nopCommerce to the wwwroot folder for your selected domain name. If you want to add a new domain to your hosting control panel for the nopCommerce site, you can refer to this guide to add domain to WebsitePanel with Arvixe. We are using WebsitePanel and Arvixe Windows hosting in this demo, if you are using other web hosting service or hosting control panels, this maybe different.

Once you have finished uploading nopCommerce to web server. Log on your hosting account, go to Hosting Spaces >> File Manager. Then browse to your nopCommerce folder on web server.

Open the wwwroot folder, you can find all your nopCommerce files. If it was a zip or RAR file you have uploaded, you can select the compressed file, and unzip it in the File Manager online.

Step 3. Create MSSQL database for nopCommerce

nopCommerce is database driven. It saves a lot of data in its backend database. To install nopCommerce shopping cart, you need to create a MSSQL database for nopCommerce. Check out this step-by-step guide to create a MSSQL database on SQL server. WebsitePanel makes it very easy to set up SQL database server in your hosting control panel.

Step 4. Install nopCommerce

Now run the nopCommerce web installer by visiting this page in your web browser,  www.yournopcommercedomain.com/install. You will open a screen like below.

From the above nopCommerce installation window, you can see two sections: store information and database inforamtion.

• In the upper section (Store information), you can create the nopCommerce admin account.
• In the lower section (Database information), you will create a connection string so your nopCommerce store will be connected with the SQL database server.  Enable Use SQL Server (or SQL Express) database; choose Enter SQL connection values, then input ‘localhost‘ as SQL Server name, type in your database name; select Use SQL Server account, then input your SQL server username and SQL server password. After that, click Install button to finish nopCommerce installation.

Now you know how to install nopCommerce manually on Windows hosting server.  Should you have any trouble installing nopCommerce store, leave us a comment below, we will discuss from there.