LAMP Server Installation Guide on CentOS 5
While control panels like cPanel, Plesk, or Webmin make managing a server with multiple users easy, they're by no means required. If you're running your own Dedicated or Virtual server and want to save money on control panel licensing, you can easily install the necessary services directly. If you intend on serving web pages from your server, you'll need a web server to serve HTTP requests. In this article, we'll show you how to install Apache and PHP on a CentOS 5 server. In this example, our server's hostname is vps.example.com and resolves to the IP address 169.254.1.2.
Update your System
Connect to your server via SSH as the root user. If you're not sure how to do this, please see our guide on connecting to your server vai SSH using PuTTY. We recommend ensuring your system is up to date before installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL. This can easily be done with yum.
Install the Apache Web Server
Install the "Web Server" group using yum:
This will install the httpd package and all of its related dependencies. It will also install PHP 5.1.6. Configure chkconfig to start Apache on boot
The web server is now installed, but requires some configuration. Open the Apache configuration file with your favorite text editor. We'll use nano in this example.
Let's first change the ServerName directive. If your hostname has a properly resolving DNS entry, you can use your server's hostname. Otherwise, you can use the IP address for your server.
The DocumentRoot directive defines where Apache will serve documents. By default, this path is set to /var/www/html. If you prefer to have your documents served from a different directory, you can adjust this as desired. The Listen directive defines which IP addresses and ports Apache will bind to. The default value *:80 will cause Apache to bind to all IP addresses which is often unnecessary. Unless you know you need a certain IP to be bound to port 80 for Apache, it will usually suffice to list only your server's main IP.
Anytime the Apache configuration file is modified, the Apache service needs to be restarted for the changes to take effect. Let's restart Apache:
For additional safety, let's set the user and group ownership of /var/www/html/ to the apache user. This will prevent PHP scripts from being executed as root and performing potentially harmful actions.
Apache can be customized far beyond the few directives we've covered here. However, these few changes are all that's required to get a working installation. We can now upload our HTML files to /var/www/html/ and visit our site in a web browser. With Apache and PHP 5.1.6 installed you can now run popular web scripts like Joomla or Wordpress. Before doing so, we suggest upgrading your PHP installation to 5.3:
Install PHP 5.3
At the time of this writing, PHP 5.3.3 is installed using the php53 package. The exact version may be different in the future. Remove the old version of PHP.
Install the PHP 5.3.x package
Restart Apache
That's it. PHP 5.3 is now installed on your system. .php files will now be handled by the PHP interpretter. Of course, there are a wide range of modules to install and configuration values to tweak your PHP install. With just the simple steps listed above, your server is now able to parse PHP files.
Install MySQL
MySQL is a service that allows you to store dynamic content in a database. Most modern scripts like Wordpress and Joomla require a database service for storing content. Let's install MySQL. At the time of this writing this guide will install MySQL 5.0.95. Install the MySQL Database group:
Start the MySQL service
Configure chkconfig to start MySQL on boot
Secure your new MySQL service with mysql_secure_installation
This will prompt you to answer several questions about your MySQL service.
SERVERS IN PRODUCTION USE! PLEASE READ EACH STEP CAREFULLY!
In order to log into MySQL to secure it, we'll need the current
password for the root user. If you've just installed MySQL, and
you haven't set the root password yet, the password will be blank,
so you should just press enter here.
Since we just installed the MySQL service, there is no MySQL root password. As the message indicates, simply press ENTER at the following prompt.
OK, successfully used password, moving on...
You'll next be prompted to configure a new MySQL root password. At the prompt, enter "Y" and then provide a secure password for the root MySQL user. Remember that secure passwords should contain a mix of letters and numbers and should not be words contained within a dictionary.
root user without the proper authorisation.
Set root password? [Y/n] Y
New password:
Re-enter new password:
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
... Success!
Remove the anonymous MySQL user which is intended for testing only
to log into MySQL without having to have a user account created for
them. This is intended only for testing, and to make the installation
go a bit smoother. You should remove them before moving into aproduction environment.
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] Y
... Success!
We'll now disable remote logins for the root user. This will prevent brute force attacks against the root MySQL user's password. If you don't plan to have outside servers connect to your database, you could take this one step further and block MySQL's port 3306 in your firewall. This is beyond the scope of this guide.
ensures that someone cannot guess at the root password from the network.
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] Y
... Success!
Remove the the 'test' databaes from MYSQL
access. This is also intended only for testing, and should be removed
before moving into a production environment.
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] Y
- Dropping test database...
... Success!
- Removing privileges on test database...
... Success!
Now reload the privilege tables to have our changes take effect.
will take effect immediately.
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] Y
... Success!
Cleaning up...
We're finished securing MySQL
installation should now be secure.
Thanks for using MySQL!
With MySQL securely installed, we'll now want to install PHP support for connecting to MySQL databases. This can be done with yum as well.
Congratulations, you've just installed your first LAMP server! A multitude of scripts can now be run from your server including Joomla, Wordpress, and many more.