QuickTip: SuiteCRM 7.6 and DreamHost

My wife (who is a realtor now 🙂 wanted a CRM so I thought I’d set SuiteCRM up on our domain so she didn’t have to pay for a commercial one.  We go through DreamHost (who I would highly recommend for a hosting company BTW) and everything I had read said in theory it should work just fine.

It didn’t.

I banged on it a little bit and finally got it working.  In case anyone is interested, here are the steps I did that I’m copying and pasting out of an email I sent back to DreamHost’s technical support in case anyone else has problems (I’m lazy and don’t feel like retyping it :).  I think the root cause is that SuiteCRM creates a config.php as part of the installation instead of having one there where you can edit the default file and directory permissions by default.

  1. Unzipped it under my top-level domain and then renamed it so the url would be XXX/suitecrm.
  2. Temporarily renamed my .htaccess so that it wouldn’t interfere with it.
  3. Did a chmod -R 775 suitecrm from the top-level domain directory.
  4. Made the PHP mods to my .php/5.5/phprc like your SugarCRM wiki mentioned and made some alterations just in case:
    post_max_size = 50M
    upload_max_size = 50M
    max_input_time = 999
    memory_limit = 140M
    upload_max_filesize = 50M
    suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = upload
    max_execution_time = 500
  5. Started the installation.  After entering in the db information and what not, clicked next and let it run.  While it hung, it did at least create some subdirectories that it needed but created them with the “wrong” permissions since it does not create a config.php until you start to install it.
  6. Did a killall php55.cgi to stop the installers.
  7. Did another chmod -R 775 on the suitecrm directory from my top-level directory.
  8. Reran the install and this time it worked like a charm.
  9. Put my .htaccess back and then edited the default permissions in config.php like the DreamHost SugarCRM talk page mentions.