How to – Installing LAMP Stack on CentOS

If you have reached this page then you most likely know about a LAMP stack.

LAMP stack is a group of basic applications that most websites running on a Linux server are served. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL/ MariaDB and PHP.

With this article, let us learn how to install this LAMP stack on CentOS. This will help you run your website from any VPS.

Prerequisite – the latest version of CentOS!

Let us dive in!

INSTALLING APACHE WEB SERVER

All you need to install the Apache web server is to type in this command in the terminal :

dnf install httpd httpd-tools

Once this is done, let us move on to starting the Apache web server :

systemctl start httpd

Make sure you enable Apache to auto start at system boot time with this command :

systemctl enable httpd

Status check :

systemctl status httpd

If you notice Enabled in the output, then Apache is running and will auto-start at boot time.

To test if Apache is running steadily, create an index.html file under the default document root with this below command :

echo "Welcome to this site!" > /var/www/html/index.html

Now, type 127.0.0.1 or localhost in your browser address bar. You should be able to see the welcome message from before. This means Apache web server is running without any problem!

INSTALLING MySQL/MariaDB

To handle your website database you need to install MySQL or MariaDB. Since MariaDB is becoming more widely used, let use it for installation. MariaDB and MySQL are both similar in configuration.

To install MariaDB, type in the following command :

yum -y install mariadb-server
systemctl start mariadb 

Let us now enable MariaDB to auto start when the server starts :

systemctl enable mariadb

Here are some important server locations to be remembered for MariaDB/ MySQL. These defaults can be changed to your preference.

MariaDB binary: /bin/mysql
MariaDB Configuration file: /etc/my.cnf
Database location: /var/lib/mysql
MariaDB logs: /var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log

Status check :

systemctl status mariadb

At this point we need to run the security script :

mysql_secure_installation

The output will ask you to enter your MariaDB root password. Since the root password isn’t set yet, press the Enter key. Then type y to set a new root password.

After this, press Enter for all the remaining questions. This is a basic step in database security.

Now, run the following command to enter the MariaDB root password and log in to the MariaDB shell :

mysql -u root -p

INSTALLING PHP

To install PHP and modules, type in this command :

dnf install php php-fpm php-mysqlnd php-opcache php-gd php-xml php-mbstring -y

So, Apache by default uses PHP-FPM instead of mod_php on centos to run a PHP code. With the help of the above command, we have also installed PHP-FPM. All we need to do is start it.

systemctl start php-fpm

Remember to enable it to auto start at system boot time :

systemctl enable php-fpm

Status check :

systemctl status php-fpm

If the output shows enabled then PHP-FPM id up and running. Since PHP-FPM package installs a php.config file we need to restart Apache web server to run the PHP code :

systemctl restart httpd

We also need to run the following command so that SELinux can allow Apache to execute the PHP code via PHP-FPM :

setsebool -P httpd_execmem 1

AND CONCLUSION…

Give yourself a pat on the back because you have successfully installed the AMP of LAMP Stack!

We hope this article helped.

Do share your thoughts!