How To Install Memcached on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached is a system daemon that allows you to cache information on RAM memory, this allows you better app speeds and avoids bad performance on your dedicated or VPS server. It is very useful for optimizing dynamic websites and enabled speed by caching objects in memory.

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 Memcached on a CentOS 8 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 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 CentOS 8

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

sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Memcached on CentOS 8.

Memcached packages are included in the default CentOS 8 repositories. Execute the following commands to install Memcached:

sudo dnf install memcached libmemcached

Once the installation is completed, enable and start the Memcached service using the following command:

sudo systemctl enable memcached --now

Step 3. Configuring Memcached.

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

sudo nano /etc/sysconfig/memcached

PORT="11211"
USER="memcached"
MAXCONN="1024"
CACHESIZE="64"
OPTIONS="-l 127.0.0.1,::1"

Save the file and restart the Memcached service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart memcached

Step 4. Configure Firewall for Memcached.

CentOS comes with a firewall configuration tool FirewallD, you’ll need to open the port on the firewall:

sudo firewall-cmd --new-zone=memcached --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=memcached --add-port=11211/udp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=memcached --add-port=11211/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 5. Installing Memcached PHP Extension.

You can install the PHP Memcached extension by typing:

sudo dnf install php-pecl-memcache

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached on CentOS 8 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Memcached website.