How To Install Lighttpd with PHP and MariaDB on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Lighttpd with PHP and MariaDB on your Ubuntu 15.04 server. For those of you who didn’t know, Lighttpd is a fast and secure web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web servers, effective management of the CPU load, and an advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting, and many more) Lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation LLMP stack (Linux, Lighttpd, MariaDB, and PHP) on a Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 15.04, and any other Debian-based distribution.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo useror access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Lighttpd with PHP and MariaDB on Ubuntu 15.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Lighttpd on Ubuntu 15.04.

Lighttpd is available to install from the official Ubuntu repositories, So if you want to install Lighttpd, you only have to run this command:

apt-get install lighttpd

To start up the Lighttpd web server, run the commands below and You can test the status of the server by accessing the IP address of your VPS in a web browser. Upon success, you will see the Lighttpd welcome page:

systemctl start lighttpd.service

Step 3. Installing MariaDB.

To install MariaDB in Ubuntu 15.10 run the following command:

apt-get install mariadb-server

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

To log into MariaDB, use the following command (note that it’s the same command you would use to log into a MySQL database):

mysql -u root -p

To start the database, run the commands below:

systemctl start mariadb.service

Step 4. Installing PHP and other PHP5 modules.

Next, run the commands below to install PHP5 and other PHP modules:

apt-get install php5 php5-fpm php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-xmlrpc

Enable PHP5 CGI modules in Lighttpd with the following commands:

sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi 
sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php

After enabling the modules, you need to restart the Lighttpd service by running the following command:

systemctl force-reload lighttpd

Testing if PHP is working:

nano /srv/www/htdocs/info.php

Then, we’ll simply add the following line to the file:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Step 5. Configure firewall on Ubuntu 15.04.

Because everything is blocked by default on Ubuntu 15.04, you must enable HTTP/HTTPS traffic through the firewall. To enable web traffic, run the commands below:

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

Congratulations! You have successfully installed the LLMP stack. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing LLMP Server (Linux, Lighttpd, MariaDB & PHP) in CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Lighttpd, MariaDB, and PHP websites.

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