Install Apache, PHP And MySQL On CentOS 7 (LAMP)

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 7.0 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support. LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

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.

I will add the EPEL repo here to install latest phpMyAdmin as follows:

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY*
yum -y install epel-release

2 Installing MySQL / MariaDB

MariaDB is a MySQL fork of the original MySQL developer Monty Widenius. MariaDB is compatible with MySQL and I've chosen to use MariaDB here instead of MySQL. To install MySQL, we do install MariaDB like this:

yum -y install mariadb-server mariadb

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

systemctl start mariadb.service
systemctl enable mariadb.service

Set passwords for the MySQL root account:

mysql_secure_installation

3 Installing Apache2

CentOS 7 ships with apache 2.4. Apache2 is directly available as a CentOS 7.0 package, therefore we can install it like this:

yum -y install httpd

By default apache will be installed, if-not then please install it as shown above

Now configure your system to start Apache at boot time...

systemctl start httpd.service

systemctl enable httpd.service

In CentOS 7.0 uses Firewall-cmd, so I will customize it to allow external access to port 80 (http) and 443 (https).

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http 
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --reload

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the Apache2 placeholder page:

4 Installing PHP5

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

yum -y install php

We must restart Apache afterwards:

 systemctl restart httpd.service

5 Testing PHP5 / Getting Details About Your PHP5 Installation

The document root of the default website is /var/www/html. We will now create a small PHP file (info.php) in that directory and call it in a browser. The file will display lots of useful details about our PHP installation, such as the installed PHP version.

vi /var/www/html/info.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Now we call that file in a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100/info.php):

As you see, PHP5 is working, and it's working through the Apache 2.0 Handler, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5. MySQL is not listed there which means we don't have MySQL support in PHP5 yet.

6 Getting MySQL Support In PHP5

To get MySQL support in PHP, we can install the php-mysql package. It's a good idea to install some other PHP5 modules as well as you might need them for your applications. You can search for available PHP5 modules like this:

yum search php

Pick the ones you need and install them like this:

yum -y install php-mysql

In the next step I will install some common PHP modules that are required by CMS Systems like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal:

yum -y install php-gd php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-snmp php-soap curl curl-devel

Now restart Apache2:

 systemctl restart httpd.service

Now reload http://192.168.0.100/info.php in your browser and scroll down to the modules section again. You should now find lots of new modules like curl etc there.:

7 phpMyAdmin installation

phpMyAdmin is a web interface through which you can manage your MySQL databases.
phpMyAdmin can now be installed as follows:

yum install phpMyAdmin

Now we configure phpMyAdmin. We change the Apache configuration so that phpMyAdmin allows connections not just from localhost (by commenting out the <Directory "/usr/share/phpmyadmin"> stanza):

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf

[...]
Alias /phpMyAdmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin
Alias /phpmyadmin /usr/share/phpMyAdmin

#<Directory /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/>
#   <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
#     # Apache 2.4
#     <RequireAny>
#       Require ip 127.0.0.1
#       Require ip ::1
#     </RequireAny>
#   </IfModule>
#   <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
#     # Apache 2.2
#     Order Deny,Allow
#     Deny from All
#     Allow from 127.0.0.1
#     Allow from ::1
#   </IfModule>
#</Directory>


<Directory /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/>
        Options none
        AllowOverride Limit
        Require all granted
</Directory>

[...] 

Next we change the authentication in phpMyAdmin from cookie to http:

vi /etc/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php

[...]
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type']     = 'http';    // Authentication method (config, http or cookie based)?
[...]

Restart Apache:

systemctl restart  httpd.service

Afterwards, you can access phpMyAdmin under http://192.168.0.100/phpmyadmin/:

8 Links

    Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/
    PHP: http://www.php.net/
    MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
    CentOS: http://www.centos.org/
    phpMyAdmin: http://www.phpmyadmin.net/