Setting up a basic development environment
A development environment is an area away from your public store where you can test out changes to your site. This is always a good idea if you are making user interface changes, code changes, or critical configuration changes. You can make these in your development environment without fear of affecting your public store or impacting users on your site. Once you are satisfied with the changes, you can then apply them to your public store.
A development environment is not needed to work with nopCommerce. You can instead opt to upload the files to your hosting provider and start using your site immediately. However, this is not recommended. There are a lot of settings and changes you will want to test before applying them to your public/production site.
Installing Internet Information Services (IIS)
Your development system can utilize any of the supported operating systems. However, you will most likely need to install the Internet Information Services (IIS). IIS is a web server that is used by hosting providers to run websites. It is part of Windows and you can use it to run your nopCommerce website on your PC to help develop and customize it away from your public storefront.
To install IIS, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Start | Control Panel | Programs.
- Click on Turn Windows features on or off.
- Check the Internet Information Services checkbox. This will automatically check Web Management Tools and World Wide Web Services.
- Click on OK. This will install IIS, after which you will need to restart your system.
Installing SQL Server and Visual Studio
nopCommerce requires Microsoft SQL Server, and if you plan to perform custom development, you will also need Visual Studio. Fortunately, Microsoft provides free Express versions of this software. These versions are not as feature-packed as some of their higher-end counter parts, but they are still very powerful products and will allow you to run and modify nopCommerce in your development environment.
- SQL Server Express 2012: This version of SQL Server is ideal for developing and powering web and small server applications. You can download this version of SQL Server from http://www.microsoft.com/sql.
- Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web: This version of Visual Studio is made for building web applications with the latest standards. You can download this version of Visual Studio from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio.
After downloading each of these products, run their installers, starting with SQL Server. After SQL Server is installed, install Visual Studio to complete your development environment.
These two products will also install the other pre-requisites needed for nopCommerce, namely ASP.NET 4.5 and MVC 4.