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

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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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 restart