Install LAMP server in CentOS 6.4

LAMP is a acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. In this very first tutorial on my blog, I will walk through the steps on how to install LAMP server in CentOS 6.4. For the sake of installation information, and to rule out any configuration/hardware mix-up's, here is the quick high level details of my test machine. Keep in mind, this is specific to my installation, and you may need to make some adjustments depending on how you are setting up your test environment. With that in mind, consider yourselves informed!

• My test machine is a Virtual Machine, running on VMware Workstation v9.0.0
• I have installed the VM with the following settings:

•  My testbox hostname is:  snoopy.localdomain.vm

I'm also assuming that you have atleast completed the basic installation of CentOS. I know.. I should have done that tutorial first, shame on me. I promise I'll do another tutorial on installing CentOS. In the meanwhile, there are plenty of alternative sites that go through the basic installation of Linux. NOTE - Some of these packages may in-fact already be installed. If they are, GREAT!

Install Apache

yum install httpd

Start apache and set it to start automatically on every reboot.

service httpd start

chkconfig httpd on

Test Apache

Open your Browser and Enter the IP address for your machine “http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx″. You will see the Apache splash page.

Install MySQL

yum install mysql mysql-server

Start MySQL and set it to start automatically on every reboot.

service mysqld start

chkconfig mysqld on

Once it is done installing, you can set a root MySQL password:

/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

The prompt will ask you for your current root password. Since you just installed MySQL, you won’t have one, so leave it blank by pressing enter.

Enter current password for root (enter for none): 
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

Then the prompt will ask you if you want to set a root password. Go ahead and choose Y and follow the instructions. CentOS automates the process of setting up MySQL, asking you a series of yes or no questions. It’s easiest just to say Yes to all the options. At the end, MySQL will reload and implement the new changes.

By default, a MySQL installation has an anonymous user, allowing anyone
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 a
production environment.

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y                                            
 ... Success!

Normally, root should only be allowed to connect from 'localhost'.  This
ensures that someone cannot guess at the root password from the network.

Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
... Success!

By default, MySQL comes with a database named 'test' that anyone can
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!

Reloading the privilege tables will ensure that all changes made so far
will take effect immediately.

Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

Cleaning up...

All done!  If you've completed all of the above steps, your MySQL
installation should now be secure.

Thanks for using MySQL!

Install PHP

yum install php php-mysql

Restart Apache server

service httpd restart

Test PHP

Create a test php page, and save it to the /var/www/html directory

nano /var/www/html/testphp.php

< ?php phpinfo(); ? > <-- (Make sure you fix the tags)

Now open the testphp.php file in browser using http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/testphp.php. If everything is done correctly, it will display the details about your php configuration. If not, go back and check your steps, and insure you didn't miss any steps. At this point you might want to add a few other modules that will be helpful for your coding. And don't hurt to have installed.

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

You might want add APC too - APC is a free and open PHP opcode cacher for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and Xcache. It is strongly recommended to have one of these installed to speed up your PHP page.

yum install php-pecl-apc

And restart Apache..

service httpd restart

NOTE - Additional php modules can be located by performing a search.

yum search php

Install phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a free open source web tool, used to manage your MySQL databases. By default phpMyAdmin is not found in CentOS official repositories; however it is available in the EPEL repository. EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. At the time I wrote this, 6-8 was the latest version.

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Now you can install phpMyAdmin

yum install phpmyadmin

Configure phpMyAdmin

Open the phpmyadmin.conf file and make the following changes.

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf

If you want to access phpMyAdmin from anywhere other then the localhost, then comment the following lines, just below the beginning of the file.

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

# 
#    
#     # Apache 2.4 
#      
#       Require ip 127.0.0.1 
#       Require ip ::1 
#      
#    
#    
#     
# Apache 2.2 
#     Order Deny,Allow 
#     Deny from All 
#     Allow from 127.0.0.1 
#     Allow from ::1 
#    
#

Copy the config sample file and change the authentication method from "cookie" to "http".

cp /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config.sample.inc.php /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php

nano /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php

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

Restart the Apache service

[root@localhost /]# service httpd restart

Now you should be able to access the phpmyadmin console using http://ipaddress or http://domainname/phpmyadmin/. Enter your MySQL username and password which you have given in previous steps. In my case its “root” and “password”. Shh, don't tell anyone.. ;) Which leads too..