How to prepare Magento 2 beta package for offline use

Magento 2 comes with a composer installer and all external dependencies including sample data are being installed using composer. However, I needed to have a simple way to install Magento 2 along with sample data in an offline environment, without using composer. I had a few reasons to do this – I wanted to have a fast way to install Magento 2 multiple times and I wanted to test command line installing for MageTesting.com purposes.

Main goals are:

• avoid downloading more than 1 GB of data each time
• let it work in offline mode
• operate with smaller packages
• simplify steps needed to install Magento 2

Cloning GIT repository and downloading dependencies resulted in downloading more than 1GB of data:

• Magento 2 code cloned with packages downloaded using composer: 471.3 MB (194 MB after gzipping)
• sample data media: 590.9 MB (zipped)
• sample data code: 0.2 MB (zipped)

I decided to prepare a Magento 2 package which contains only code needed to run application and to prepare sample data package which could be installed just by copy pasting that into Magento 2. Recently I was playing with a sample data compression script provided by Vinai Kopp, and I made a fork which can compress Magento 2 sample data.

At the end I have the following packages:

• Magento 2 code (26 MB, gzipped)
• compressed sample data media (92MB, zipped)
• sample data code: 0.2 MB (zipped)

I know there is a composer cache. I know I could use Vagrant/Docker or other virtualization, but still I wanted to avoid overcomplicating the process. If you see that use case useful, please find all needed steps described below.

Just keep in mind it is written for 0.42.0-beta1 release of Magento 2 and it is not a recommended way to install Magento 2.

Prepare Magento 2 package

1. Clone GIT repository

git clone git@github.com:magento/magento2.git

2. Install composer dependencies

composer.phar update

3. Remove huge directories not needed to run application

rm -rf dev/tests
rm -rf .git
rm -rf vendor/magento/zendframework1/documentation
rm -rf vendor/magento/zendframework1/tests
rm -rf vendor/magento/zendframework1/demos

4. Prepare package

tar czf magento2-0.42.0-beta1.tar.gz -C magento2/ .

Prepare Magento 2 sample data package

1. Downlod demo data

curl -O http://packages.magento.com/_packages/magento_sample-data-0.42.0-beta1.zip
curl -O http://packages.magento.com/_packages/magento_sample-data-media-0.42.0-beta1.zip

2. Compress demo data

compress-sample-data-magento2.sh magento_sample-data-media-0.42.0-beta1.zip

Install Magento 2 using created package

1. Prepare directory and unpack package:

mkdir magento2
tar xzf magento2-0.42.0-beta1.tar.gz -C magento2/

2. Set required permissions

cd magento2
chmod -R 777 var/
chmod -R 777 pub/media/
chmod -R 777 pub/static
chmod -R 777 app/etc/

3. Run Setup

php -f setup/index.php install 
    --base_url=http://local.magento2new.com/ 
    --backend_frontname=admin 
    --db_host=127.0.0.1 
    --db_name=mage2 
    --db_user=mage2 
    --db_pass=mage2 
    --admin_firstname=John 
    --admin_lastname=Doe 
    --admin_email=john@example.com 
    --admin_username=admin 
    --admin_password=admin 
    --language=en_US 
    --currency=USD 
    --timezone=Europe/Warsaw

Install sample data using package

1. Unpack media sample data

unzip -q -d pub/media/ compressed-magento_sample-data-media-0.42.0-beta1.zip

2. Unpack sample data code

mkdir dev/tools/Magento/Tools/SampleData
unzip -q -d dev/tools/Magento/Tools/SampleData magento_sample-data-0.42.0-beta1.zip

3. Install sample data

php -f dev/tools/Magento/Tools/SampleData/install.php -- --admin_username=admin

4. Make sure newly added files are writable:

chmod -R 777 pub/media/
chmod -R 777 pub/static

This one is a little dirty, but as far as I know composer doesn’t support installing local packages.

Let me know if you find this article useful and if you have any thoughts around that.