LAMP setup for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Introduction

Here is how I set up my LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) computer.  I’ve also installed Python and phpMyAdmin.

It’s worth noting that I’m only using my LAMP server to test website stuff that will run on other people’s servers; I’ve not even thought about the security issues that might concern internet-facing servers.

Package Installation

To start off, I used Synaptic Package Manager to install:

• php5
• apache2
• mysql5
• phpMyAdmin (a nice GUI for managing MySQL tables)
• php5-cli (only needed if you want to run PHP from the command line)
• libapache2-mod-python (if you want to use Python)

and associated packages.

Synaptic Package Manager can be found in the drop-down menu under System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager . The packages can be found by clicking the Search icon and typing in the package names.

When a package name is selected, Synaptic Package Manager kindly prompts one to install all other files required.

The MySQL installation prompts one to set a password for the mysql root user; I did this. More on this below.

Where important things are

The Apache configuration file is located at:

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf

The default web folder is here:

/var/www

Apache error logs are here:

/var/log/apache2/error.log

If anything goes horribly wrong, reading these can often be very helpful. (Even if what’s written in the file makes no sense, it’s often quite easy to pop the error message or warning into Google. Very often, there’s someone talking about the problem using real words in the first page of hits.)

Apache access logs live here:

/var/log/apache2/access.log

NB: Both etc and var can be found two levels ‘up’ from the home folder.

Test to make sure PHP works

Make file called test.php with one line:

# test.php
<?
phpinfo();
?>

Using emacs or vi is cool, but gedit is easy to use.

Save the file in the var/www/ folder. (See below if you encounter permissions problems when saving the file!)

Open a browser (like, say, Firefox) and type

http://localhost/test.php

and you should get a page come up with all sorts of useful and interesting information about your Apache server!

If it doesn’t, try restarting your apache server, as described below.

Saving files in folders where you don’t have permission

If you get an error like this from the command line:

cannot create regular file `test.php’: Permission denied

or like this from gedit:

You do not have the necessary permissions to save the file. Please, check that you typed the location correctly and try again.

you don’t have permission to save the file in the place you’re trying to save it.

You can open gedit from the command line like this:

sudo gedit &

This should prompt you for the root password. (This is the linux root password, not the mysql root password from above!) This allows you to act as if you’re root and save your file in the var/www folder.

Setting up phpMyAdmin

Open this file:

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf

and add this line:

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

(If you have permissions problems, try the same trick as described above.)

Restart Apache. (See below.)

Check to make sure phpMyAdmin works

Open your favorite web browser (say, Firefox) and navigate to:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

This should bring up a login screen. You can log in to phpMyAdmin by using ‘root’ as the username and the mysql root password set during installation.

The mysql root password can be changed in phpMyAdmin by going to the privilege page and clicking the pencil icon next to each root account. Enter a password in appropriate field of the newly-loaded page.

Once logged in, you can use phpMyAdmin to manage your MySQL databases.

Restarting Apache

From the command line, type:

sudo apache2ctl restart

The first time I did this, I received this warning:

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

This went away when I added this line:

ServerName localhost

to:

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf

and restarted Apache. After a restart, there were no further complaints.

Change the default root for Apache

By default, Apache2 will look at /var/www for all website files. That’s why entering

http://localhost/test.php

in a browser displayed the document saved in /var/www above.

A different folder can be made the default. Make a folder for the website in the desired location. In this example, I’m calling this directory public_html and I’ll call my website latin (since it’s going to be a hyper cool site all about Latin language stuff).

All the sites available to Apache are stored here:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/

Each site needs a config file. On installation, Apache has a default file config file here:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

which points to a default website here:

var/www/index.html

which can be seen when this:

http://localhost/index.html

or this:

http://localhost

is entered into a browser.

To change the default to point to your new folder, first copy the configuration file for the default site, giving it the name of the new site. This can be done from the command line as such:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/latin

Open the new file (e.g. /etc/apache2/sites-available/latin in the above example) and make the following changes.

Change the line:

DocumentRoot /var/www/

to point to wherever your folder is. I put mine in my folder (myfolder) in the home directory:

DocumentRoot /home/myfolder/public_html

Similarly, change:

Directory /var/www/

To:

Directory /home/myfolder/public_html

Disable the ‘default’ site:

sudo a2dissite default

Enable the ‘new’ site:

sudo a2ensite latin

Restart Apache:

sudo apache2ctl restart

Check to make sure the new default location works

Make a simple HTML file, like for example:

<html>
<body>
Hello world!  Oh happy day - all is working!
</body>
</html>

and save it as index.html in the new folder. In my case, this was here:

/home/myfolder/public_html/index.html

and put

http://localhost/index.html

or this:

http://localhost

is entered into a browser.

This should now point to your index.html file in the folder you specified, not the default index.html file in var/www/.