Saturday Sitecore Learning: Manual Installation: Installing from the .ZIP File

In this post, we will look into Manual installation option.

Installation Overview:
Before proceeding, we need to understand what will happen in the installation process. In my previous post we discussed about installation using executable(.exe). There after giving all the information, and click on the install button, in the background it will perform the below operations,

  • Creates 5 databases, like shown belowsitecoredb
  • Copies Sitecore site in the specified destination folder path.
  • Creates new website in IIS, and point to the destination folder.
  • Takes care of the other details like updating the database information in ConnectionStrings.config file, folder securities, and other configurations.

When we go through manual installation, we need to take care of all the above steps.

Sitecore Manual Installation:
I have downloaded latest Sitecore .ZIP file (Sitecore 8.2 rev. 160729) from dev.sitecore.net. Unzip the file, then we can see the three folders as shown below, copy all these three folders to destination folder.

sitecore-folders

Now we will look into Database setup,

Step 1: Open SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in Admin mode, Right click on Databases, and select Attach new databases. All the .mdf and .ldf files are present inside the Databases folder, which can be found in the unzipped folder. Attach all five databases.

attach-db

Step 2: Next step is to create new user. Navigate to Security –>Login, and click on ‘New Login’, and map all the five databases, with db_owner role.

db-login
new-login-1anew-login-1bnew-login-1c

Now all the databases are set.

Next we will proceed to Website setup:

Step 1: Copy your Sitecore license (license.xml) file under Data folder, and update the path in WebsiteApp_ConfigSitecore.config file.

<sc.variable name="dataFolder" value="F:\inetpub\wwwroot\Data" />

Step 2: Update the ConnectionStrings.config file, which is present in WebsiteApp_Config path.

connectionstring

Step 3: Open IIS, and create new website, and make sure to add new host with site name.

IIS-website

Now run the site, it will load the Sitecore default home page.
In next post we will explore the Sitecore installation option using SIM.

Happy Learning 🙂