Magento 2.0 – “Commerce Built Better” was made available on 17^th November 2015, and there have been major changes in the platform. Magento 2.0 comes in with many new features in terms of Usability, User Experience, Architecture, Scalability and many more features. These new features makes it a truly impressive e-Commerce Software. This guide covers installing Magento 2.0 using composer.

What is Composer?

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP that allows you to declare required libraries and it will manage them for you. In simple terms, define all the required libraries and composer would add/update them for you.  Composer can also be used on Shared Hosting, refer Using Composer on Shared Hosting for steps.

Steps for Installing Magento 2.0

Step 1:

Get MagentoConnect Secure Keys: Navigate to Secure Keys and copy your Secure Keys. These would be required for authentication in Step 4. Also you wold require these keys later while upgrading your store.

Step 2:

Login to your server as file system owner.

Step 3:

Navigate to your installation directory and make sure that it is blank. If the installation directory is not blank, you might encounter an installation error.

Step 4:

Create a project by cloning Magento 2.0 repository using ‘composer create-project command’

Enter the following commands:

[shell]composer create-project –repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition <installation directory name>[/shell]

For instance

[shell] composer create-project –repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition home/public_html/magento2/
[/shell]

Step 5:

When asked for authentication, enter your Public Key from Step 1 as Username and Private Key from Step 1 as Password. You might be asked if you wish to save the Authentication key, you can enter Y if you wish to.

On hitting enter composer would download project and its required dependencies and install them. This might take a while to complete depending upon your network speed.

Once the download is completed you could navigate to front-end of your server and continue with the installation. Or complete the installation from the back-end using Magento 2.0 command line.