Configure the Magento application

Now that you’ve finished installing the Magento application, you need to configure it. This topic provides some recommended configuration settings for Magento; the list is not complete so watch this space.

Set up cron

cron—the UNIX task scheduler—is critical to Magento’s day-to-day operations. It schedules things like reindexing, newsletters, e-mails, sitemaps, and so on. A crontab is a cron configuration.

Create the Magento crontab

Starting with version 2.2, Magento creates a crontab for you. We add the Magento crontab to any configured crontab for the Magento file system owner. In other words, if you already set up crontabs for other extensions or applications, we add the Magento crontab to it.

The Magento crontab is inside #~ MAGENTO START and #~ MAGENTO END comments in your crontab.

To create the Magento crontab:

Log in as, or switch to, the Magento file system owner.
Change to your Magento installation directory.

Enter the following command:

bin/magento cron:install [--force]

Use --force to rewrite an existing Magento crontab.

magento cron:install does not rewrite an existing crontab inside #~ MAGENTO START and #~ MAGENTO END comments in your crontab.
magento cron:install --force has no effect on any cron jobs outside the Magento comments.

To view the crontab, enter the following command as the Magento file system owner:

crontab -l

A sample follows:

#~ MAGENTO START c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/bin/magento cron:run 2>&1 | grep -v "Ran jobs by schedule" >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/magento.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/update/cron.php >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/update.cron.log
* * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/magento2/bin/magento setup:cron:run >> /var/www/html/magento2/var/log/setup.cron.log
#~ MAGENTO END c5f9e5ed71cceaabc4d4fd9b3e827a2b

The update/cron.php file exists in Composer- and archive-based Magento installations. It does not exist if you installed Magento by cloning the Magento 2 git repository.

In Composer-based installations, Magento creates the update/ directory when you run composer create-project. Running composer install does not create the update/ directory (if it did not exist before). See Recreate the Magento updater.

For more information about cron, including how to remove a crontab and run cron from the command line, see Configure and run cron.

Security settings and recommendations

After installation, we recommend the following:

Make sure your file ownership and permissions are set properly
We strongly recommend changing the default Admin URL from admin to something else
Make sure the X-Frame-Option HTTP header is set properly.
Take precautions against cross-site scripting (XSS) by securing your templates

If you installed by cloning the Magento repository, make sure that when you deploy Magento, you only include files and folders that are required for the production environment. Files and folders that are not required can potentially expose security risks.

Enable Apache server rewrites

If you use the Apache web server, you must enable server rewrites for pages to display properly. Otherwise, you’ll see pages without styles and other issues.

Section on Apache server rewrites

Caching in a multi-webnode environment

If you have multiple webnodes, you cannot use Magento’s default file caching because there is no synchronization between webnodes. In other words, activity on one webnode is written to that webnode’s file system only. Subsequent activity, if performed on another webnode, can result in unnecessary files being written or can result in errors.

Instead, use Redis for both the default cache and the page cache.

Server settings

This section briefly discusses settings we recommend you consider for the server on which Magento runs. Some of these settings are not directly related to Magento; these are provided as suggestions only.

Log rotation

The UNIX logrotate utility enables you to administer systems that generate large numbers of log files. It allows automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files. Each log file can be handled daily, weekly, monthly, or when the log file exceeds a specified size.

For more information, see one of the following:

Set up iptables rules to enable various Magento services to communicate.

Whether you have one server or many, you must open ports in the firewall to enable Magento services to communicate. For example, if you use the Solr search engine with Magento Commerce, you must enable it to communicate with the web server. If you have multiple web nodes, you must enable them to communicate with each other.

More information:

Ubuntu: Ubuntu documentation page.
CentOS: CentOS how-to.

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) rules

We don’t recommend whether or not you use SELinux at all; however, if you use it, you must configure Magento services to communicate with each other similar to configuring iptables.

More information: