CubeCart

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for CubeCart. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing and choose Select, then Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of m5.large or larger. The CubeCart workload is PHP and MariaDB heavy, and catalog and checkout operations benefit from memory. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login).

Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet. Create or select a security group that allows inbound port 22 from your management network and inbound ports 80 and 443 from the networks your customers use. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger.

Select Launch instance. First-boot initialisation takes a few seconds after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass.

The following command launches an instance from the SecureAnyCloud CubeCart Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing, and <key-name> with your EC2 key pair name.

Replace <subnet-id> with your subnet ID. Replace <security-group-id> with a security group that opens ports 22, 80 and 443 as described above.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type m5.large \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --block-device-mappings '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/sda1","Ebs":{"VolumeSize":30,"VolumeType":"gp3"}}]' \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=cubecart-01}]'

On success, the command prints a JSON document. Note the instance ID. Once the instance is running, retrieve its public address with aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids <instance-id> --query "Reservations[].Instances[].PublicIpAddress" --output text.

Connect over SSH with the key pair you selected and the public IP address from Step 2. The SSH login user for the CubeCart 6.7.5 on Ubuntu 24.04 AMI is ubuntu.

Connect with ssh -i <path-to-key.pem> ubuntu@<instance-public-ip>. Substitute your key path and the instance's public IP address.

The per-instance administrator password is written to a root-only file on first boot. Read it with:

sudo cat /root/cubecart-credentials.txt

The file lists the storefront URL, the admin control panel URL, the administrator username (admin) and password, and the MariaDB database name, user and password. Store the administrator password in your password manager, and treat the file as sensitive.

CubeCart is served by three systemd units. Confirm that they are active:

systemctl is-active nginx php8.3-fpm mariadb

Each line returns active. Confirm that nginx is listening on the HTTPS port with ss -tlnp | grep ':443'. Confirm the PHP version with php -v. This image ships PHP 8.3.

The CubeCart cron processes scheduled tasks and runs every five minutes through a systemd timer:

systemctl status cubecart-cron.timer

Browse to https://<instance-public-ip>/admin.php to reach the admin control panel. The certificate is self-signed, so your browser shows a security warning the first time. Choose to proceed (in Chrome, select Advanced, then Proceed).

Sign in with the username admin and the password from /root/cubecart-credentials.txt.

After you sign in, you land on the Dashboard. It shows sales figures, recent orders, a store overview and quick tasks. The left-hand menu gives you Customers, Inventory, Reporting, File Manager and Settings.

The customer-facing storefront is at https://<instance-public-ip>/. Your customers browse the catalog, add products to the basket and check out there.

The first-boot password is unique to your instance, but you should still set your own. In the admin control panel, open Settings > Administrators and edit the admin user.

Set your name and email address, and change the password to one you control. CubeCart stores administrator passwords as bcrypt hashes.

Open Settings > Store Settings. Set the Store Name, the store email address, and your address, country and default currency. These appear on the storefront, on invoices and in transactional emails.

The store URL is pinned on first boot to your instance address. When you move to a custom domain (see below), update it here and in /var/www/cubecart/includes/global.inc.php.

CubeCart organises your shop with categories and products.

• Categories (Inventory > Categories) group your products, for example Clothing, Accessories or Downloads.
• Products (Inventory > Products) are what you sell. Add a product, set its name, price, stock and description, assign it to a category, and upload product images.
• Product Options (Inventory > Product Options) define variants such as size or colour.

The image ships with one example category and product so the storefront renders out of the box. Delete them once you have added your own.

CubeCart processes orders through payment and shipping extension modules.

• Payment gateways (Manage Extensions > Payment) include PayPal, Stripe, Sage Pay and others. Enable the gateways you use and enter your merchant credentials.
• Shipping modules (Manage Extensions > Shipping) let you charge by weight, price or a flat rate, or integrate a carrier. Configure the rules that match your fulfilment.

Place a test order end to end before you go live, to confirm your payment and shipping configuration.

The image serves HTTPS with a self-signed certificate so the store works immediately, but browsers show a warning. For production, point a DNS name at the instance's public address and install a free Let's Encrypt certificate.

The commands below are illustrative. Replace shop.example.com with your domain and run them as root. They involve a domain you own and interactive prompts, so run them yourself.

Install Certbot and the nginx plugin, then request a certificate. Certbot edits the nginx site in place and reloads nginx:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx

sudo certbot --nginx -d shop.example.com

After the trusted certificate is live, set the store URL to your https://shop.example.com address under Settings > Store Settings. Then update $glob['standard_url'] in /var/www/cubecart/includes/global.inc.php to match.

The CubeCart database lives in MariaDB on the /var/lib/mysql volume. The application files and product images live under /var/www/cubecart. Back up both.

A simple database dump is:

sudo mysqldump --single-transaction cubecart | gzip > cubecart-db-$(date +%F).sql.gz

Take EBS snapshots of the data volumes for point-in-time recovery, and take a snapshot before any CubeCart version upgrade. Keep the operating system patched with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade.

The application and database tiers are on dedicated EBS volumes, and each volume can be resized independently:

df -h /var/lib/mysql /var/www

/var/lib/mysql holds the MariaDB data directory and /var/www holds the CubeCart code, storefront document root and product images.

To grow a tier, modify the EBS volume in the EC2 console. Then extend the filesystem with sudo resize2fs <device>.