How To Install Memcached on AlmaLinux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached is a free and open-source high-performance distributed memory caching system. Memcached is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM. This reduces the number of times an external data source must be read, which lowers overheads and speeds up response times.

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 through the step-by-step installation of the Memcached distributed memory object caching system on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8, CentOS or Rocky Linux 8
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or 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 Memcached on AlmaLinux 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2. Installing Memcached on AlmaLinux 8.

By default, Memcached is available on AlmaLinux 8 base repository. Now run the following command to install Memcached to your system:

sudo dnf install memcached libmemcached

Verify Memcached installation:

memcached --version

After Memcached installation, start the Memcached service and enable the service to run on boot time by issuing the commands below:

sudo systemctl enable memcached
sudo systemctl start memcached
sudo systemctl status memcached

Step 3. Configure Memcached.

The Memcached default configuration file is /etc/sysconfig/memcached. You can edit this file to set start options for the Memcached service:

sudo nano /etc/sysconfig/memcached

Modify the following file:

PORT="11211"
USER="memcached"
MAXCONN="1024"
CACHESIZE="128"
OPTIONS="-l 127.0.0.1,::1"

Step 4. Configure the Firewall.

By default, the service port is not whitelisted in the firewall to allow us to connect outside client requests, thus we need to allow it:

sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=11211/tcp --zone=public --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 5. Install Memcached PHP Libraries.

Now we install Memcached PHP support using the following command below:

sudo dnf install php-pecl-memcache php-pecl-memcached

The PHP module for the cache system is now on our server, it’s time to add it to the php.ini file:

echo "extension=memcache.so" >> /etc/php.d/memcache.ini

Finally, restart Apache to change take effect:

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Memcached distributed memory caching on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Memcached website.