How To Install Memcached on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Debian 10. 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 Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• 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 Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2.  Installing Memcached on Debian 10.

Run the following command to install Memcached:

sudo apt install memcached libmemcached-tools

Once the installation is completed, the Memcached service will start automatically. You can verify it by checking the status of the service:

sudo systemctl status memcached

Step 3. Configuring Memcached.

The default configuration file can be found at:

nano /etc/memcached.conf

Change the settings, Example settings for 1GB caching:

# Start with a cap of 64 megs of memory. It's reasonable, and the daemon default
# Note that the daemon will grow to this size, but does not start out holding this much
# memory
-m 1024

# Default connection port is 11211
-p 11211

# Run the daemon as root. The start-memcached will default to running as root if no
# -u command is present in this config file
-u memcache

# Specify which IP address to listen on. The default is to listen on all IP addresses
# This parameter is one of the only security measures that memcached has, so make sure
# it's listening on a firewalled interface.
-l 192.168.77.20

Restart the Memcached service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart memcached

Step 4. Configure Firewall.

Run the following commands to open the Memcached port in the firewall:

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.77.20 to any port 11211

Step 5. Installing Memcached extension for PHP.

To use Memcached as a caching database for your PHP application such as WordPress, you need to install the php-memcached extension:

sudo apt install php-memcached

After that, we can restart Apache so that the changes take place:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached on Debian 10 Buster system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Memcached website.