Transferring osCommerce to Your Live Site

It should be mentioned at this point that if you are thinking of doing a fair amount of work on the default site, then you are advised to actually work on a copy of the site on your own PC. This entails setting up what is a called a Development Environment on your machine; the idea being that you do all the hard work offline and only deploy the finished product to your live site.

However, this means that you have to install PHP, Apache, and MySQL before you install osCommerce and ensure that they are all up and running and working together before you can do any work at all. Since the aim of this book is to teach you specifically about osCommerce we do not cover any of that here. For more information on how to set up a development environment, you can take a look at the professional edition of this book, Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition (ISBN 1-904811-14-0), or simply do a search on Google for installation instructions and work from there.

By far the easiest method would be to use a native upload feature from your host’s file manager over a quick connection. If this is available to you, simply use it to upload the archive file across to the host server. The following screenshot shows how this is achieved using the demo site’s host:

Alternatively, assuming your site has an FTP account enabled, the following two methods represent a quick and painless method of uploading files with FTP.