Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze (LAMP)

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 02/14/2011

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Debian Squeeze 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

First we install MySQL 5 like this:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

You will be asked to provide a password for the MySQL root user - this password is valid for the user root@localhost as well as root@server1.example.com, so we don't have to specify a MySQL root password manually later on:

New password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Repeat password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Apache2

Apache2 is available as a Debian package, therefore we can install it like this:

apt-get install apache2

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the Apache2 placeholder page (It works!):

Apache's default document root is /var/www on Debian, and the configuration file is /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Additional configurations are stored in subdirectories of the /etc/apache2 directory such as /etc/apache2/mods-enabled (for Apache modules), /etc/apache2/sites-enabled (for virtual hosts), and /etc/apache2/conf.d.

4 Installing PHP5

We can install PHP5 and the Apache PHP5 module as follows:

apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

We must restart Apache afterwards:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart