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How To: Install LAMP on Ubuntu

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My brother called me today, telling me about his company wanting to move their web development and testing environment in-house. They had already downloaded Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), but didn’t know how to get Apache, MySQL, or PHP installed. He was signed into gTALK, so I sent him one command line…about 5 minutes later, they had the LAMP stack running.

Below is a laundry list of commands to help you configure the perfect Ubuntu server.

Last Update: 2013-05-12 – added Nginx

LAMP Stack (Apache, Mysql, PHP)

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

(More) PHP 5

Some applications require other PHP5 mods

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-gd php5-mysql php5-curl php5-cli php5-cgi php5-dev

Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

NGIX doesn’t start on its own, so:

sudo service nginx start

Add Nginx module to Webmin

phpMyAdmin

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Choose Apache and then YES for dbconfig-common.
If you ever need to edit phpMyAdmin config:

sudo nano /etc/dbconfig-common/phpmyadmin.conf

Webmin

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Scroll to the bottom and paste the following lines then save:

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib
deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

Import the key

wget http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc
sudo apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

Update the sources list

sudo apt-get update

Run the install

sudo apt-get install webmin

Start Webmin

sudo /etc/webmin/start

When it’s finished, open Firefox or Chrome and type:

http://localhost:10000/ (or if on a network) http://your-server-ip:10000/

If you’ve installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu (or if you don’t know your password) you can set a new one:

sudo passwd ubuntu

You’ll be prompted to enter your new password twice. Now, you can login to Webmin.

ProFTPd

sudo apt-get install proftpd

(I always select “standalone”)

Turn on Passive FTP via Webmin:
Servers –> ProFTPD server –> Virtual Servers –> Default Server –> Networking Options

Masquerade as address = your-server-outside-ip
PASV Port Range: 1024-1088

Sendmail

sudo apt-get install sendmail

PostFix Mail

sudo apt-get install postfix

Select “Internet Site” and then enter the domain name you want the Reverse DNS entry to be. BTW: To avoid your server being blacklisted, get a reverse DNS entry!

Alternative PHP Cache (APC)

APC is the de-facto in PHP acceleration. It’s a PHP opcode cacher and works by caching PHP objects, functions, and database queries into your server’s RAM. If you run a WordPress web site – then it takes full advantage of APC out-of-the-box. See my post on The Perfect APC Configuration

sudo apt-get install php-apc

By default, Ubuntu will install this from a repository which has an outdated version. To install the latest version of APC:

sudo apt-get install make
sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev
sudo apt-get install php-pear
sudo pecl install apc
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Uninstall APC

sudo pecl uninstall apc

Memcached

Like APC, Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. However, it can work together with multiple servers (unlike APC).

sudo apt-get install memcached
sudo apt-get install php-pear
sudo pecl install memcache

Check to see if Memcached is running

ps aux | grep memcached

Image Magick

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Icecast2

Icecast is a streaming audio server. If you ever wanted to have your own web radio station (like Shoutcast) here it is:

sudo apt-get install icecast2

Configure Icecast2. Mainly, setting up your passwords and default port.

sudo nano /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml

Enable init.d script. Scroll to the bottom and change enable=true

sudo nano /etc/default/icecast2/

Start icecast2

sudo /etc/init.d/icecast2 start

If you left the default port as 8000 then you can view your Icecast2 Server

http://your-server.com:8000/

Munin – Graphical Server Monitor

Munin requires PHP-CLI

sudo apt-get install php-cli

Now, this is a single server setup, so let’s install munin and munin-node

sudo apt-get install munin munin-node

Configure Munin:

sudo nano /etc/munin/munin.conf

The first thing you should see is the operating directories. We need to change one of them:

# dbdir   /var/lib/munin
# htmldir /var/cache/munin/www
# logdir /var/log/munin
# rundir  /var/run/munin

to

# dbdir   /var/lib/munin
htmldir /var/www/munin
# logdir /var/log/munin
# rundir  /var/run/munin

Now let’s edit apache.conf

sudo nano /etc/munin/apache.conf

Delete everything inside apache.conf  and just add:

Alias /munin /var/www/munin

Move the web files to /var/www/munin

sudo mv /var/cache/munin/www/ /var/www/munin

Set permissions

sudo chown munin.munin -R /var/www/munin

Restart Munin

sudo /etc/init.d/munin-node restart

Finally, restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

http://your-server.com/munin

Cacti – Graphical Server Monitor

sudo apt-get install cacti-spine

Choose YES for dbconfig-common and Apache2. When finished you need to configure:

http://your-server-ip-address/cacti

Default user & pass: admin / admin

Remove cacti

sudo apt-get remove cacti

BMON – Simple CLI Bandwidth Monitor

sudo apt-get install bmon

When it’s finished installing:

bmon

Zip and Unzip

sudo apt-get install zip

Other handy related commands:

Edit PHP.ini

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Set Recursive Permissions for your websites direcotry

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/
cd /var/www/ sudo chmod -R www-data:www-data FOLDER NAME

Block IP addresses/hackers using IPTABLES

Single IP

iptables -A INPUT -s 192.168.100.1 -j DROP

IP Range

iptables -A INPUT -s 192.168.100.0/24 -j DROP

You can also manage IPTABLES (e.g., the linux firewall) via Webmin under “Networking”.

Manage packages

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove

Remove LAMP

sudo apt-get purge libapache2-mod-auth-mysql phpmyadmin
sudo apt-get purge mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1
sudo apt-get purge apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libapache2-mod-php5
sudo apt-get autoremove

Serve your websites from an EBS volume

This practice has saved my butt on more than one occasion. Rather than use the given storage attached to the EC2 instance, I always create a 1TB EBS volume and mount it as /public_html/. That way, if your EC2 instance crashes…you’re web site files will not. For this, we’ll assume our attached EBS volume is /xvdf/.

First you must be logged in as root:

su

Make sure you’re in the file system root:

cd

Now, let’s list all the attached drives. You should see /dev/xvda1, /dev/xvdb, /dev/xvdf/ etc…

sudo fdisk -l

Let’s make a directory (such as /public_html/)

mkdir /public_html/

Finally, let’s mount our EBS volume:

mount -t ext4 /dev/xvdf /public_html/

Now you can serve your websites from an EBS volume!

Benchmark the CPU

time for i in {0..10000}; do for j in {0..1000}; do :; done; done

More resources:

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