Tutorial

How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Arch Linux

Published on September 8, 2012

Arch Linux

How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on Arch Linux

About LAMP

The LAMP stack is a group of open source software used to get web servers up and running. The acronym stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Arch Linux uses the powerful Pacman installer which can download all of the most recent, required packages for each program with one command.

Set Up

The steps in this tutorial require the user to have root privileges. You can see how to set that up here in steps 3 and 4.

Step One—Install Apache

Apache is a free open source software that runs over 50% of the world’s web servers.

Before installing any of the LAMP programs, we should update the package manager:

sudo pacman -Syu

Once the update is complete, we can install Apache:

sudo pacman -S apache

After Apache is installed, we need to make a couple of changes in the configuration.

Open up the apache configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Comment out the unique_id_module (you can use ctrl w to find it quickly):

#LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so

Restart Apache:

sudo systemctl restart httpd

During the apache restart, you may get a notice that says the following:

httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for droplet1
httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
                                                                         [DONE]

Although this alert does not interfere with the apache launch, you can easily eliminate it if you like by adding your hostname to your configuration.

Open up the hosts file:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add your hostname to the end of the line beginning with 127.0.0.1:

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost droplet1

Subsequent restarts of Apache will no longer display that message. With that, Apache is now installed on your server. Directing your browser to your server’s IP address (http://12.34.56.789) will display an auto-index directory. You can quickly try out a sample page by adding an index.html file to Arch’s document root directory, located within “srv/http”:

sudo nano /srv/http/index.html

<html>
<title>Welcome</title>
<body>
<h2>Hello, Welcome to Arch</h2>
</body>
</html>

You can visit the placeholder page by going to your server’s IP address in your browser.

How to Find your Server’s IP address

You can run the following command to reveal your server’s IP address.

curl -s icanhazip.com

Step Two—Install MySQL

MySQL is a powerful database management system used for organizing and retrieving data.

Since March 2013, MariaDB has become the default implementation of MySQL in Arch repositories. Installing the package "mysql" will automatically drop in MariaDB as a replacement. See the original announcement for more details.

To install MySQL, open terminal and type in these commands:

sudo pacman -S mysql

Hit enter if it asks you anything, unless you know you don't want the defaults.

Once you have installed MySQL, start it running

sudo systemctl start mysqld

Finish up by running the MySQL set up script:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The process will ask you for your current MySQL root password (not to be confused with your server password) and, since it has not yet been set, simply press enter.

When prompted, “Set root password?” type Y, and afterwards enter in your new MySQL root password.

After that it’s easiest just to say Yes to all the options. At the end, MySQL will reload and implement the new changes.

By default, a MySQL installation has an anonymous user, allowing anyone
to log into MySQL without having to have a user account created for
them.  This is intended only for testing, and to make the installation
go a bit smoother.  You should remove them before moving into a
production environment.

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y                                            
 ... Success!

Normally, root should only be allowed to connect from 'localhost'.  This
ensures that someone cannot guess at the root password from the network.

Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
... Success!

By default, MySQL comes with a database named 'test' that anyone can
access.  This is also intended only for testing, and should be removed
before moving into a production environment.

Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
 - Dropping test database...
 ... Success!
 - Removing privileges on test database...
 ... Success!

Reloading the privilege tables will ensure that all changes made so far
will take effect immediately.

Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

Cleaning up...

Once you're done installing MySQL, finish the LAMP stack by installing PHP.

Step Three—Install PHP

PHP is an open source web scripting language that is widely used to build dynamic webpages.

To install PHP, open terminal and type in this command.

sudo pacman -S php php-apache

PHP should also be added to the apache configuration file:

sudo  nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Paste in this text block within the config.

# Use for PHP 5.x:
LoadModule php5_module       modules/libphp5.so
AddHandler php5-script php
Include conf/extra/php5_module.conf

Step Four—See your PHP Config and Add Programs to Startup

After LAMP is completely installed, we can take a look and see the PHP details by creating a quick php info page

To set this up, first create a new blank file:

sudo nano /srv/http/info.php

Add in the following line:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Then Save and Exit.

Restart apache so that all of the changes take effect:

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Visit your php info page (make sure you replace the example ip address with your correct one): http://12.34.56.789/info.php

Your screen should then look like this:

To close out the LAMP installation, open up the configuration file of Arch’s innitscripts and add the apache server and MySQL daemons to the list of programs that run upon server startup:

sudo systemctl enable mysqld httpd

Congratulations, you have now installed the LAMP server on Arch Linux!

See More

Once LAMP is installed, you have a great base on which to build your site. Check out this tutorial to see how to install Wordpress on Arch

By Etel Sverdlov

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About the authors

Etel Sverdlov

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10 Comments

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geitemuil • September 14, 2012

I was able to set up a LAMP on Arch Linux. Now I’m trying to install wordpress on it using SSH, but it keeps on failing. Is there a way to access my new LAMP server using a FTP client? Can you help me out here what steps to take?

Moisey Uretsky

DigitalOcean Employee

• September 14, 2012

Hi,

You would need to install an FTP server in order to be able to access your server via an FTP account.

However, you should be able to install Wordpress using SSH and we have some articles that can help you with that: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-on-centos-6--2

This is for CentOS but the majority of things should be very similar.

If you are running into a particular problem paste us your error messages and we’ll help you troubleshoot it.

sven • February 5, 2013

Arch Linux has moved to use systemd instead of init so rc.d method for starting MySQL daemon will not work when pacman -Syu has been used right after a new droplet has been set up.

sven • February 5, 2013

So the solution goes like this:

pacman -Sy to update the repository database
replace pacman
pacman -S mysql
pacman -S glibc (needs to be renewed or the MySQL daemon won’t start)
making the folder needed for MySQL logs: mkdir /var/log/mysql chown mysql:mysql /var/log/mysql chmod 750 /var/log/mysql
editing /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysql/error.log

[mysqld] log-error=/var/log/mysql/error.log

sudo /usr/bin/mysqld_safe &
sudo mysql_secure_installation
kill the mysqld_safe
get the daemon handling script for /etc/rc.d/mysqld from a previous installation or from another server

mr • March 8, 2013

when I do sudo pacman -Syu, it says sudo: pacman: command not found

kevinvanrooij • April 13, 2013

This guide is a bit out-dated, systemd has replaced sysvinit/initscripts. Daemons do not go in rc.conf anymore, but are handled by systemd. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd

nickkyky • June 10, 2013

As of 2013-03-25 mysql is no longer an offical package for Arch, see https://www.archlinux.org/news/mariadb-replaces-mysql-in-repositories/ for the announcement.

krimeware • July 10, 2013

You must update the command “sudo pacman -S mysql” to “sudo pacman -S mariadb” because Arch Linux didn’t use MySQL from time ago.

Kamal Nasser

DigitalOcean Employee

• July 10, 2013

We have updated the article re: mariadb.

ynomani • August 15, 2013

I am not able to locate the ip address of my virtualbox.ifconfig|grep inet is giving 10.0.2.15 after installing apache I would like to see index page from my windows7 explorer. How I would do this