Installing SugarCRM
A pre-requisite to Importing contacts, you need to install SugarCRM if you do not already have a working system
Download and Install SugarCRM[edit | edit source]
SugarCRM provides easy stack installers which make trying the system as close to a one-click operation as possible. That is great for trying it out. If you are beyond the exploration stage you will want to install into an existing infrastructure, so we'll assume that approach.
- Visit the SugarCRM homepage, and click the top navbar link to "Sugar Open Source"
- Skip the "Wizard" and go right to the "Download Page" because you know what you're doing and also have a pre-existing setup of Linux, Apache MySQL and PHP
- Download SugarCE-5.0.0e.zip (production release) or the later available production release (getting only the application).
- Visit the recommended "Installation" instructions page at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/installation/
- Install SugarCRM according to the instructions. Note: I immediately ran into trouble because the instructions did say to chmod 766 all files that needed to be writable by the web_user. This command renders the directories non-executable which manifests in include errors because the web user (www-data) can not see into those directories (to find includes). The following snippet is a fix:
# find directories in the ./crm path and change the mode on them so that all users can execute (see into) the directory
find ./crm/ -type d |xargs chmod a+x
There is one more 'gotcha' that I ran into with the installation. The application wants to create a .htaccess file (which doesn't exist in the distribution and would not necessarily be writable to the web user.) As a failsafe, the .htaccess content is printed to the screen in the installer. However it doesn't properly display (lacking newline characters) so the content is not suitable for copy and paste into the file. I resorted to the source which generates the .htaccess content, and used that. An alternative is to simply touch and chmod 777 a .htaccess file prior to running the installer; and then chmod'ing it go=r after install.
