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This tutorial is based on Chubbable’s post with some modifications and correction . You can find the original article here. It is not that the original is wrong or something, it is just that there has been several changes since the time of posting. It is still one of of the most accurate tutorials for installing Opencart on DigitalOcean that I could found. Thanks Chubbable

All the images in this post in from Chubbable’s article.

Step 1: Create a VPS with LAMP

• Login to your Digital Ocean account and click on the Create Droplet button.
• If you just want to play around, you may opt to choose $5/month. But if you’re migrating your OpenCart store from a shared hosting service, then $10/month should be minimum.
• Choose a Region or Location

It’s best if you choose the location of your Data Center that is closest to your target audience.

• Select Image / Application

click on the Applications tab and scroll down a bit and click to choose LAMP 16.04. When activated, it should turn blue.

• Create an SSH Key Pair to use with your OpenCart VPS (optional)

If you’re on Windows, then follow this video tutorial on how to create SSH Key Pair on Windows.

If you’re on Linux, this video guide will teach you how to create your SSH Key Pair for your VPS.

Copy and paste in the content of your .pub SSH key. Enter a comment or name for it.

Make sure it is saved and activated, the button turns blue when activated.

• Finally, click on the Create Droplet button. This should start creating your VPS.

Tha’s all for creating your VPS. LAMP should be installed after your droplet is created.

Step 2: Login to your OpenCart VPS

Login to your newly created VPS and use your IP address. Copy the IP address from your hosting control panel.

Then launch a terminal (or PuTTy if on Windows) and SSH your way in to your VPS.

The command should be…

ssh -i .ssh/name-of-your-ssh-key root@your.server.ip.address

Note 1: In Linux or Unix, the default SSH folder path is ~/.ssh or /home/anyuser-name/.ssh

Note 2: In case you did not create an SSH key from step 1

ssh -i root@password (You will receiving an email with account information after creating Droplet)

Secure MySQL server by following the wizard.

Take note first of your MySQL root password. Write it down or copy to somewhere safe.

Now run mysql_secure_installation and follow the wizard.

Enter mysql_secure_installation command and enter your copied MySQL root password.

Then answer the following question like so:

Enable password validator? - answer n for noChange the root password? - answer n for noRemove anonymous users? - answer n for noDisallow root login remotely? - answer n for noRemove test database and access to it? - answer nReload privileges? answer y for yes

And it should be all done after that.

Step 3: Update the system & install Unzip

Update your system by doing the following command.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

It should take a little while to complete.

Install Unzip via apt-get, this software shall be used to extract the download archived file o OpenCart.

To install the software….

apt-get install -y unzip

Step 4: Download OpenCart & Extract

While still on your terminal, type wget then SPACEBAR then paste in the copied download link address, and hit ENTER key. The command should look like below.

wget https://github.com/opencart/opencart/archive/master.zip

Do a ls command on your ~ (home) folder, you should see a new file named master.zip

Extract the file by doing unzip command:

unzip master.zip

Do a ls command.

You shold see a new folder named opencart-master

Copy the contents of the upload folder, which is inside of opencart-master folder, to /var/www/html. This folder should hold all the OpenCart files, it’s your public_html folder.

If you make a cd opencart-master command, you should see the folder.

To copy all the files inside the upload folder… do the following command;

cp -R ~/opencart-master/upload/* /var/www/html/

Double-check that you have copied all the files, do the following;

cd /var/www/html

Then do a ls command.

Step 5: Create OpenCart config.php file

The command;

touch /var/www/html/admin/config.php

and…

touch /var/www/html/config.php

Step 6: Set folder permission and owner

To set folder owner for the OpenCart folder, do the following command;

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

To set folder permisson, that is… 755 for all folders while 644 for all files;

chmod -R a=r,a+X,u+w /var/www/html

Step 7: Enable Mcrypt PHP module

There are several module missing from LAMP installer. Thus, we have to install these ourselves

Please take note that the last two are not required by Opencart, but will cause error with refreshing module and installing extension

apt-get install php7.0-curl  
apt-get install php7.0-mcrypt  
apt-get install php7.0-zip  
apt-get install php7.0-xml  
apt-get install php7.0-dom

Restart Apache webserver

service apache2 restart

Step 8: Create OpenCart Database

Let’s create a new database for OpenCart exclusive use. We will use the command-line, so no PHPMyAdmin involve here.

Login as root to MySQL server

mysql -u root -p

Then enter your root password. It won’t be printed on your screen.

Create the database

For the sake of demonstration, I will name my OpenCart database as opencartdb, user is opencartuser, password is letmepass.

So here we go…

create database opencartdb;

Hit Enter key.

Create the database user and grant privileges

grant all on opencartdb.* to 'opencartuser'@'localhost' identified by 'letmepass';

Hit enter key.

Refresh MySQL

flush privileges;

That’s it! That’s how to create a database using command-line. Next, install OpenCart.

Step 9: Install OpenCart

Time to install OpenCart

Launch your favorite web browser and point to your VPS IP address.

You should be redirected to OpenCart’s installation wizard.

Check the page, make sure that all is green. Which means… all the requirements are met by your VPS.

Everything is straight-forward on this page, just fill all the fields with the proper data and install OpenCart.

Click Continue button till you finish installing it.

Delete the install folder for security reason.

rm -rf /var/www/html/install

And that’s it! If you reached this far, then pat yourself on the back.