Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.3 (LAMP)

Posted by OS DON September 05, 2009

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.3 (LAMP)

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

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Last edited 07/24/2009
LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 5.3 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Installing MySQL 5.0

To install MySQL, we do this:

yum install mysql mysql-server

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Run

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword
mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

to set a password for the user root (otherwise anybody can access your MySQL database!).

3 Installing Apache2

Apache2 is available as a CentOS package, therefore we can install it like this:

yum install httpd

Now configure your system to start Apache at boot time...

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

... and start Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd start

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the Apache2 placeholder page:

Apache's default document root is /var/www/html on CentOS, and the configuration file is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Additional configurations are stored in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ directory.

4 Installing PHP5

We can install PHP5 and the Apache PHP5 module as follows:

yum install php

We must restart Apache afterwards:

/etc/init.d/httpd start

5 Testing PHP5 / Getting Details About Your PHP5 Installation

The document root of the default web site is /var/www/html. We will now create a small PHP file (info.php) in that directory and call it in a browser. The file will display lots of useful details about our PHP installation, such as the installed PHP version.

vi /var/www/html/info.php

phpinfo();
?>

Now we call that file in a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100/info.php):

As you see, PHP5 is working, and it's working through the Apache 2.0 Handler, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5. MySQL is not listed there which means we don't have MySQL support in PHP5 yet.

6 Getting MySQL Support In PHP5

To get MySQL support in PHP, we can install the php-mysql package. It's a good idea to install some other PHP5 modules as well as you might need them for your applications. You can search for available PHP5 modules like this:

yum search php

Pick the ones you need and install them like this:

yum install php-mysql php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc

Now restart Apache2:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Now reload http://192.168.0.100/info.php in your browser and scroll down to the modules section again. You should now find lots of new modules there, including the MySQL module:

7 phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a web interface through which you can manage your MySQL databases.
First we enable the RPMforge repository on our CentOS system as phpMyAdmin is not available in the official CentOS 5.3 repositories:

On x86_64 systems:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

On i386 systems:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

phpMyAdmin can now be installed as follows:

yum install phpmyadmin

Now we configure phpMyAdmin. We change the Apache configuration so that phpMyAdmin allows connections not just from localhost (by commenting out the stanza):

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

#
#  Web application to manage MySQL
#

#
#  Order Deny,Allow
#  Deny from all
#  Allow from 127.0.0.1
#

Alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpmyadmin
Alias /phpMyAdmin /usr/share/phpmyadmin
Alias /mysqladmin /usr/share/phpmyadmin

Next we change the authentication in phpMyAdmin from cookie to http:

vi /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

[...]
/* Authentication type */
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';
[...]

Afterwards, you can access phpMyAdmin under http://192.168.0.100/phpmyadmin/:

8 Links

Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/
PHP: http://www.php.net/
MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
CentOS: http://www.centos.org/
phpMyAdmin: http://www.phpmyadmin.net/

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