Installing and configuring the LAMP web server for PHP development

Many novice web developers are switching to Linux-based distributions just to create their own stable web server for testing and debugging their projects. And projects most often, of course, in PHP. In this article, I offer you my own way of deploying a LAMP web server (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) in a very accessible form.

This method has been using for several years on .deb-based distributions. Previously, the web server was installed and worked fine on Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, LMDE (with some amendments) and now runs on elementaryOS.

So, let's begin.
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In advance, we assume that our site should be accessible at mysite.zz , and the folder with the site files is located along the path /home/user/server/mysite.zz. The web server will be installed on ElementaryOS. Therefore, the standard text editor scratch-text-editor will be used in the setup process. You can use any text editor by replacing the “scratch-text-editor” with the name of your editor.

1. Install the necessary packages

We enter in the terminal

sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php5 phpmyadmin 

When installing packages, we will need to pre-configure them. in pseudographic terminal mode.
In the first window, we are prompted to enter the password for the MySQL user “root”. Enter the password and confirm it:


Next comes phpmyadmin setup.
Here we will be asked which web server to use to run phpmyadmin. Mark apache2 with the space bar and press enter:

On the next screen we read some information and click enter.

Next, we confirm the configuration of the database using dbconfig-common:

Enter the password entered above in

2. Check server and phpmyadmin

Go to any browser at localhost . If the server is normally installed, then we should see the server test page:
To access phpmyadmin follow the link localhost / phpmyadmin . Enter the login "root" and the password entered earlier:

There you can also change the phpmyadmin interface language.

If everything is done correctly, then we will proceed to the management of our databases:

3. Server setup

Create a link to phpmyadmin in / var / www

 sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin /var/www 

Open the server configuration file:

 sudo scratch-text-editor /etc/apache2/apache2.conf 

and add a line to the end of the file:

 ServerName localhost:80 

4. Adding our site

Open the hosts file to add our site:

 sudo scratch-text-editor /etc/hosts 

and add a line to the file

 127.0.1.1 mysite.zz 

Create in any folder a site configuration file called “mysite.zz” with content

 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAlias mysite.zz www.mysite.zz DocumentRoot /home/user/server/mysite.zz <Directory home/user/server/mysite.zz/> AllowOverride All </Directory> </VirtualHost> 

and copy it with superuser rights in / etc / apache2 / sites-available

 sudo cp ___ /etc/apache2/sites-available/ 

We activate our site:

 sudo a2ensite mysite.zz 

Activate the mod-rewrite module (necessary for the implementation of the CNC):

 sudo a2enmod rewrite 

And restart the server:

 sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart 

5. Checking the operation of our site

Create an index.php file in our site folder (/home/user/server/mysite.zz), for example, with the following content:

 <? echo 'hello!))'; ?> 

Next, in any browser, go to mysite.zz

If we see our page, then everything is done correctly.

6. Possible problems

Phpmyadmin is not available at localhost / phpmyadmin

To correct this error, you must reconfigure phpmyadmin

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin 

The following problems were observed by me only in LMDE. But it is possible that they may occur in other distributions.

Access to our site may be denied by the server.

To fix this problem, the extension .conf must be added to the name of the configuration file of our site in / etc / apache2 / sites-available

 mysite.zz.conf 

file content should be edited as follows

 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAlias mysite.zz www.mysite.zz DocumentRoot /home/user/server/mysite.zz <Directory home/user/server/mysite.zz/> AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost> 

And site activation must be done by config name

 sudo a2ensite mysite.zz.conf 

Login and password are not defined when entering phpmyadmin

To correct this error, we will make some changes to the phpmyadmin configuration file.
Open it

 sudo scratch-text-editor /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php 

and add the following lines

 $dbuser = 'root'; $dbpass = 'kenny'; 

after the lines

 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] = $dbuser; $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] = $dbpass; 

Now phpmyadmin should recognize our login and password.

Addition

This article did not consider connecting the project to the database. There are a lot of connection options in both procedural PHP and object-oriented. The only thing I can say about this is that, in any implementation of connecting to a specific database, you will need to use the user “root” and the password that we specified when setting up the packages during their installation.

Also, the installation of postal north was not considered, since this is already the topic of a separate article. There are many mail servers in the repositories of any distributions, and each with its own nuances.

In conclusion, I note that the PHP configuration file php.ini configuration is located in the / etc / php5 / apache2 / directory.

Good luck to you projects and clean code!