Step 1 — Installing Apache
Install Apache using Ubuntu’s package manager, apt:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2Test after staring service – systemctl start apache2
http://your_server_ipHow To Find your Server’s Public IP Address
ip addr show eth0 | grep inet | awk ‘{ print $2; }’ | sed ‘s/\/.*$//’
Step 2 — Installing MySQL
Again, use apt to acquire and install this software:
sudo apt install mysql-serversudo mysql_secure_installation
This will ask if you want to configure the VALIDATE PASSWORD PLUGIN.
If you prefer to use a password when connecting to MySQL as root, you will need to switch its authentication method from auth_socket to mysql_native_password. To do this, open up the MySQL prompt from your terminal:
sudo mysql
Next, check which authentication method each of your MySQL user accounts use with the following command:
SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;
Output+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
| user | authentication_string | plugin | host |
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
| root | | auth_socket | localhost |
| mysql.session | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost |
| mysql.sys | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost |
| debian-sys-maint | *CC744277A401A7D25BE1CA89AFF17BF607F876FF | mysql_native_password | localhost |
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
In this example, you can see that the root user does in fact authenticate using the auth_socket plugin. To configure the root account to authenticate with a password, run the following ALTER USER command. Be sure to change password to a strong password of your choosing:
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';
Then, run FLUSH PRIVILEGES which tells the server to reload the grant tables and put your new changes into effect:
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Check the authentication methods employed by each of your users again to confirm that root no longer authenticates using the auth_socket plugin:
SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;
Output+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
| user | authentication_string | plugin | host |
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
| root | *3636DACC8616D997782ADD0839F92C1571D6D78F | mysql_native_password | localhost |
| mysql.session | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost |
| mysql.sys | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost |
| debian-sys-maint | *CC744277A401A7D25BE1CA89AFF17BF607F876FF | mysql_native_password | localhost |
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)
You can see in this example output that the root MySQL user now authenticates using a password. Once you confirm this on your own server, you can exit the MySQL shell:
exit
At this point, your database system is now set up and you can move on to installing PHP, the final component of the LAMP stack.
Step 3 — Installing PHP
Once again, leverage the apt system to install PHP. In addition, include some helper packages this time so that PHP code can run under the Apache server and talk to your MySQL database:
sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql
This should install PHP without any problems. We’ll test this in a moment.
In most cases, you will 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 the web server to prefer PHP files over others, so 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:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
Move the PHP index file (highlighted above) to the first position after the DirectoryIndex specification, like this:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
<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. Confirm the save by typing Y and then hit ENTER to verify the file save location.
check Apache’s config file for syntax error:
apachectl configtest
After this, restart the Apache web server in order for your changes to be recognized. Do this by typing this:
sudo systemctl restart apache2
You can also check on the status of the apache2 service using systemctl:
sudo systemctl status apache2
Sample Output● apache2.service - LSB: Apache2 web server
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
└─apache2-systemd.conf
Active: active (running) since Tue 2018-04-23 14:28:43 EDT; 45s ago
Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
Process: 13581 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/apache2 stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 13605 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/apache2 start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Tasks: 6 (limit: 512)
CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
├─13623 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─13626 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─13627 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─13628 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
├─13629 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
└─13630 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
Press Q to exit this status output.
Step 4 — Setting Up Virtual Hosts (Recommended)
When using the Apache web server, you can use virtual hosts (similar to server blocks in Nginx) to encapsulate configuration details and host more than one domain from a single server. We will set up a domain called your_domain, but you should replace this with your own domain name. To learn more about setting up a domain name with DigitalOcean, see our Introduction to DigitalOcean DNS.
Apache on Ubuntu 18.04 has one server block enabled by default that is configured to serve documents from the /var/www/html directory. While this works well for a single site, it can become unwieldy if you are hosting multiple sites. Instead of modifying /var/www/html, let’s create a directory structure within /var/www for our your_domain site, leaving /var/www/html in place as the default directory to be served if a client request doesn’t match any other sites.
Create the directory for your_domain as follows:
sudo mkdir /var/www/your_domain
Next, assign ownership of the directory with the $USER environment variable:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/your_domain
The permissions of your web roots should be correct if you haven’t modified your unmask value, but you can make sure by typing:
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/your_domain
Next, create a sample index.html page using nano or your favorite editor:
nano /var/www/your_domain/index.html
Inside, add the following sample HTML:/var/www/your_domain/index.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to Your_domain!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Success! The your_domain server block is working!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Save and close the file when you are finished.
In order for Apache to serve this content, it’s necessary to create a virtual host file with the correct directives. Instead of modifying the default configuration file located at /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf directly, let’s make a new one at /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf
Paste in the following configuration block, which is similar to the default, but updated for our new directory and domain name:/etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName your_domain
ServerAlias www.your_domain
DocumentRoot /var/www/your_domain
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Notice that we’ve updated the DocumentRoot to our new directory and ServerAdmin to an email that the your_domain site administrator can access. We’ve also added two directives: ServerName, which establishes the base domain that should match for this virtual host definition, and ServerAlias, which defines further names that should match as if they were the base name.
Save and close the file when you are finished.
Let’s enable the file with the a2ensite tool:
sudo a2ensite your_domain.conf
Disable the default site defined in 000-default.conf:
sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf
Next, let’s test for configuration errors:
sudo apache2ctl configtest
You should see the following output:
OutputSyntax OK
Restart Apache to implement your changes:
sudo systemctl restart apache2
Apache should now be serving your domain name. You can test this by navigating to http://your_domain, where you should see something like this:
With that, you virtual host is fully set up. Before making any more changes or deploying an application, though, it would be helpful to proactively test out your PHP configuration in case there are any issues that should be addressed.
Step 5 — Testing PHP Processing on your Web Server
Create the file at the web root you created in the previous step by running:
sudo nano /var/www/your_domain/info.php
This will open a blank file. Add the following text, which is valid PHP code, inside the file:info.php
<?php
phpinfo();
?>How to solve the phpmyadmin not found issue 404
Create a link in /var/www like this:
sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www/
Note: since 14.04 you may want to use /var/www/html/ instead of /var/www/
If that’s not working for you, you need to include PHPMyAdmin inside apache configuration.
Open apache.conf using your favorite editor, mine is vim 🙂
sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Then add the following line:
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf
For Ubuntu 15.04 and 16.04
sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/phpmyadmin.confsudo a2enconf phpmyadmin.confsudo service apache2 reload