How To Install Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP (LAMP) Stack on CentOS 8 [Quickstart]

Introduction

In this tutorial, you’ll install a LAMP stack on a CentOS 8 server. Although MySQL is available from the default repositories in CentOS 8, this guide will walk through the process of setting up a LAMP stack with MariaDB as the database management system.

For a more detailed version of this tutorial, with more explanations of each step, please refer to How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) Stack on CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you’ll need access to a CentOS 8 server as a sudo user.

Step 1 — Install Apache

Install the httpd package with:

sudo dnf install httpd

After the installation is finished, run the following command to enable and start the server:

sudo systemctl start httpd

If firewalld is active, you’ll need to run the following command to allow external access on port 80 (HTTP):

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=http

Reload the firewall configuration so the changes take effect:

sudo firewall-cmd --reload

With the new firewall rule added, you can test if the server is up and running by accessing your server’s public IP address or domain name from your web browser. You’ll see a page like this:

Step 2 — Install MariaDB

We’ll now install MariaDB, a community-developed fork of the original MySQL server by Oracle. To install this software, run:

sudo dnf install mariadb-server

When the installation is finished, enable and start the MariaDB server with:

sudo systemctl start mariadb

To improve the security of your database server, it’s recommended that you run a security script that comes pre-installed with MariaDB. Start the interactive script with:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The first prompt will ask you to enter the current database root password. Because you just installed MariaDB and haven’t made any configuration changes yet, this password will be blank, so just press ENTER at the prompt.

The next prompt asks you whether you’d like to set up a database root password. Because MariaDB uses a special authentication method for the root user that is typically safer than using a password, you don’t need to set this now. Type N and then press ENTER.

From there, you can press Y and then ENTER to accept the defaults for all the subsequent questions.

Step 3 — Install PHP

To install the php and php-mysqlnd packages using the dnf package manager, run:

sudo dnf install php php-mysqlnd

After the installation is finished, you’ll need to restart the Apache web server in order to enable the PHP module:

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Step 4 — Test PHP with Apache

The default Apache installation on CentOS 8 will create a document root located at /var/www/html. You don’t need to make any changes to Apache’s default settings in order for PHP to work correctly within your web server.

The only adjustment we’ll make is to change the default permission settings on your Apache document root folder. The following command will change the ownership of the default Apache document root to a user and group called sammy:

sudo chown -R sammy.sammy /var/www/html/

We’ll now create a test PHP page to make sure the web server works as expected. First, you might want to install nano, a more user-friendly text editor, since that doesn’t come installed with CentOS 8 by default:

sudo dnf install nano

Now, create a new PHP file called info.php at the /var/www/html directory:

nano /var/www/html/info.php

The following PHP code will display information about the current PHP environment running on the server:

<?php

phpinfo();

When you are finished, save and close the file.

To test whether our web server can correctly display content generated by a PHP script, go to your browser and access your server hostname or IP address, followed by /info.php:

http://server_host_or_IP/info.php

You’ll see a page similar to this:

Related Tutorials

Here are links to more detailed guides related to this tutorial:

• Initial Server Setup on CentOS 8
• How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) Stack on CentOS 8
• Managing DNS records on DigitalOcean