In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of LAMP Stack on your Debian 8 server. For those of you who didn’t know, LAMP represents a full-featured stack containing the most popular web server known as Apache, the most popular database server MySQL and the most popular open-source web programming language known as PHP. All components are free and open-source software, and the combination is suitable for building dynamic web pages.
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 of LAMP Stack on a Debian 8 (Jessie) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 8 (Jessie).
- 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 user
or access to theroot user
. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user
, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install LAMP Stack on Debian 8
Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get
commands in the terminal:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Apache on Debian 8.
We will be installing Apache with apt-get, which is the default package manager for Debian:
apt-get install apache2
After installing apache services on your system, start all required services:
systemctl enable apache2 systemctl start apache2 systemctl status apache2
You can verify that Apache is really running by opening your favorite web browser and entering the URL http://your-server’s-address, if it is installed, then you will see this:
Step 3. Installing MariaDB on Debian 8.
Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MariaDB. MariaDB is a database management system. Basically, it will organize and provide access to databases where our site can store information:
apt-get install mariadb-server
Once complete, you can verify MariaDB is installed by running the below command:
systemctl start mariadb systemctl status mariadb
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
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
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
Step 4. Installing PHP 7 on Debian 8.
Since PHP7 is not included in any Debian official source list, we gonna use the version compiled by Dotdeb.org, which is pretty widely used:
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following two lines to the end of the file:
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org jessie all deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org jessie all
Then add the dotdeb key to your know keys:
wget https://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg sudo apt-key add dotdeb.gpg
Now install the required dependencies:
apt-get update apt-get install mysql-server apache2 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-cli php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-intl php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-soap php7.0-xml php7.0-zip
Your server should restart Apache automatically after the installation of both MariaDB and PHP. If it doesn’t, execute this command:
systemctl restart apache2 systemctl restart mariadb
To test PHP, create a test file named info.php with the content below. Save the file, then browse to it to see if PHP is working:
nano /var/www/html/info.php
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Try to access it at http://your_server_ip/info.php
. If the PHP info page is rendered in your browser then everything looks good and you are ready to proceed further.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed the LAMP stack. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, and PHP) in Debian 8 (Jessie) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Apache, MySQL, and PHP web site.