How To Install Memcached on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Memcached on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. 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 the step-by-step installation Memcached on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• 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 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 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

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

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2.  Installing Memcached.

Now use the following command to install the Memcached service on your system:

sudo apt-get -y install memcached

Step 3. Configuration Memcached.

The default configuration file can be found at:

nano /etc/memcached.conf

When started, Memcached will start on port 11211 by default per the default configuration file:

# Default connection port is 11211
-p 11211

Exit and save the configuration file, and then restart Memcached:

systemctl restart memcached

Install Memcached extension for PHP

You will also need to install the required PHP extension for Memcached:

apt-get install php-memcached

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

systemctl restart apache2

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_address/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 Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Memcached website.

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