How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Ubuntu
Introduction
A "LAMP"
stack is a group of open source software that is typically installed
together to enable a server to host dynamic websites and web apps.
This term is actually an acronym which represents the Linux operating
system, with the Apache web server. The site data is stored in a
MySQL database, and dynamic content is processed by PHP.
In this guide, we'll
get a LAMP stack installed on an Ubuntu 14.04 Droplet. Ubuntu will
fulfill our first requirement: a Linux operating system.
Prerequisites
Before you begin
with this guide, you should have a separate, non-root user account
set up on your server. You can learn how to do this by completing
steps 1-4 in the initial server setup for Ubuntu 14.04.
Step One — Install
Apache
The Apache web
server is currently the most popular web server in the world, which
makes it a great default choice for hosting a website.
We can install
Apache easily using Ubuntu's package manager, apt. A package manager
allows us to install most software pain-free from a repository
maintained by Ubuntu. You can learn more about how to use apt here.
For our purposes, we
can get started by typing these commands:
sudo apt-get
update
sudo apt-get
install apache2
Since we are using a
sudo command, these operations get executed with root privileges. It
will ask you for your regular user's password to verify your
intentions.
Afterwards, your web
server is installed.
You can do a spot
check right away to verify that everything went as planned by
visiting your server's public IP address in your web browser (see the
note under the next heading to find out what your public IP address
is if you do not have this information already):
http://your_server_IP_address
You will see the
default Ubuntu 14.04 Apache web page, which is there for
informational and testing purposes. It should look something like
this:
Ubuntu 14.04 Apache
default
If you see this
page, then your web server is now correctly installed.
How To Find your
Server's Public IP Address
If you do not know
what your server's public IP address is, there are a number of ways
you can find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to
your server through SSH.
From the command
line, you can find this a few ways. First, you can use the iproute2
tools to get your address by typing this:
ip addr show eth0
| grep inet | awk '{ print $2; }' | sed 's/\/.*$//'
This will give you
one or two lines back. They are both correct addresses, but your
computer may only be able to use one of them, so feel free to try
each one.
An alternative
method is to use an outside party to tell you how it sees your
server. You can do this by asking a specific server what your IP
address is:
curl
http://icanhazip.com
Regardless of the
method you use to get your IP address, you can type it into your web
browser's address bar to get to your server.
Step Two —
Install MySQL
Now that we have our
web server up and running, it is time to install MySQL. MySQL is a
database management system. Basically, it will organize and provide
access to databases where our site can store information.
Again, we can use
apt to acquire and install our software. This time, we'll also
install some other "helper" packages that will assist us in
getting our components to communicate with each other:
sudo apt-get
install mysql-server php5-mysql
Note: In this case,
you do not have to run sudo apt-get update prior to the command. This
is because we recently ran it in the commands above to install
Apache. The package index on our computer should already be
up-to-date.
During the
installation, your server will ask you to select and confirm a
password for the MySQL "root" user. This is an
administrative account in MySQL that has increased privileges. Think
of it as being similar to the root account for the server itself (the
one you are configuring now is a MySQL-specific account however).
When the
installation is complete, we need to run some additional commands to
get our MySQL environment set up securely.
First, we need to
tell MySQL to create its database directory structure where it will
store its information. You can do this by typing:
sudo
mysql_install_db
Afterwards, we want
to run a simple security script that will remove some dangerous
defaults and lock down access to our database system a little bit.
Start the interactive script by running:
sudo
mysql_secure_installation
You will be asked to
enter the password you set for the MySQL root account. Next, it will
ask you if you want to change that password. If you are happy with
your current password, type "n" for "no" at the
prompt.
For the rest of the
questions, you should simply hit the "ENTER" key through
each prompt to accept the default values. This will remove some
sample users and databases, disable remote root logins, and load
these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes we
have made.
At this point, your
database system is now set up and we can move on.
Step Three —
Install PHP
PHP is the component
of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content. It
can run scripts, connect to our MySQL databases to get information,
and hand the processed content over to our web server to display.
We can once again
leverage the apt system to install our components. We're going to
include some helper packages as well:
sudo apt-get
install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
This should install
PHP without any problems. We'll test this in a moment.
In most cases, we'll
want to modify the way that Apache serves files when a directory is
requested. Currently, if a user requests a directory from the server,
Apache will first look for a file called index.html. We want to tell
our web server to prefer PHP files, so we'll make Apache look for an
index.php file first.
To do this, type
this command to open the dir.conf file in a text editor with root
privileges:
sudo nano
/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
It will look like
this:
<IfModule
mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex
index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
We want to move the
PHP index file highlighted above to the first position after the
DirectoryIndex specification, like this:
<IfModule
mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex
index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
When you are
finished, save and close the file by pressing "CTRL-X".
You'll have to confirm the save by typing "Y" and then hit
"ENTER" to confirm the file save location.
After this, we need
to restart the Apache web server in order for our changes to be
recognized. You can do this by typing this:
sudo service
apache2 restart
To enhance the
functionality of PHP, we can optionally install some additional
modules.
To see the available
options for PHP modules and libraries, you can type this into your
system:
apt-cache search
php5-
The results are all
optional components that you can install. It will give you a short
description for each:
php5-cgi -
server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (CGI binary)
php5-cli -
command-line interpreter for the php5 scripting language
php5-common -
Common files for packages built from the php5 source
php5-curl - CURL
module for php5
php5-dbg - Debug
symbols for PHP5
php5-dev - Files
for PHP5 module development
php5-gd - GD
module for php5
. . .
To get more
information about what each module does, you can either search the
internet, or you can look at the long description in the package by
typing:
apt-cache show
package_name
There will be a lot
of output, with one field called Description-en which will have a
longer explanation of the functionality that the module provides.
For example, to find
out what the php5-cli module does, we could type this:
apt-cache show
php5-cli
Along with a large
amount of other information, you'll find something that looks like
this:
. . .
SHA256:
91cfdbda65df65c9a4a5bd3478d6e7d3e92c53efcddf3436bbe9bbe27eca409d
Description-en:
command-line interpreter for the php5 scripting language
This package
provides the /usr/bin/php5 command interpreter, useful for
testing PHP scripts
from a shell or performing general shell scripting tasks.
.
The following
extensions are built in: bcmath bz2 calendar Core ctype date
dba dom ereg exif
fileinfo filter ftp gettext hash iconv libxml mbstring
mhash openssl pcntl
pcre Phar posix Reflection session shmop SimpleXML soap
sockets SPL
standard sysvmsg sysvsem sysvshm tokenizer wddx xml xmlreader
xmlwriter zip zlib.
.
PHP (recursive
acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used
open source
general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited
for web development
and can be embedded into HTML.
Description-md5:
f8450d3b28653dcf1a4615f3b1d4e347
Homepage:
http://www.php.net/
. . .
If, after
researching, you decide you would like to install a package, you can
do so by using the apt-get install command like we have been doing
for our other software.
If we decided that
php5-cli is something that we need, we could type:
sudo apt-get
install php5-cli
If you want to
install more than one module, you can do that by listing each one,
separated by a space, following the apt-get install command, like
this:
sudo apt-get
install package1 package2 ...
At this point, your
LAMP stack is installed and configured. We should still test out our
PHP though.
Step Four — Test
PHP Processing on your Web Server
In order to test
that our system is configured properly for PHP, we can create a very
basic PHP script.
We will call this
script info.php. In order for Apache to find the file and serve it
correctly, it must be saved to a very specific directory, which is
called the "web root".
In Ubuntu 14.04,
this directory is located at /var/www/html/. We can create the file
at that location by typing:
sudo nano
/var/www/html/info.php
This will open a
blank file. We want to put the following text, which is valid PHP
code, inside the file:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
When you are
finished, save and close the file.
Now we can test
whether our web server can correctly display content generated by a
PHP script. To try this out, we just have to visit this page in our
web browser. You'll need your server's public IP address again.
The address you want
to visit will be:
http://your_server_IP_address/info.php
The page that you
come to should look something like this:
Ubuntu 14.04 default
PHP info
This page basically
gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP.
It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being
applied correctly.
If this was
successful, then your PHP is working as expected.
You probably want to
remove this file after this test because it could actually give
information about your server to unauthorized users. To do this, you
can type this:
sudo rm
/var/www/html/info.php
You can always
recreate this page if you need to access the information again later.
Conclusion
Now that you have a
LAMP stack installed, you have many choices for what to do next.
Basically, you've installed a platform that will allow you to install
most kinds of websites and web software on your server.
Some popular options
are:
Install
Wordpress the most popular content management system on the internet
Set Up
PHPMyAdmin to help manage your MySQL databases from web browser.
Learn more about
MySQL to manage your databases.
Learn how to
create an SSL Certificate to secure traffic to your web server.
Learn how to use
SFTP to transfer files to and from your server.
Note: We will be
updating the links above to our 14.04 documentation as it is written.
