How To Install Memcached on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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 an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Memcached.

Use the following command to install the Memcached service on your ubuntu system:

sudo apt install memcached libmemcached-tools

To check the status of the service, enter the following command:

sudo systemctl status memcached

Step 3. Configuration Memcached.

Memcached can be configured by editing the /etc/memcached.conf file:

sudo nano /etc/memcached.conf

Change the settings, Example settings for 256MB 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 256

# 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 127.0.0.1

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

systemctl restart memcached
systemctl enable memcached

Step 4. Configure Firewall for Memcached.

Ubuntu comes with a firewall configuration tool called UFW. By default, UFW is installed but not enabled. Before enabling the UFW firewall first add a rule that will allow incoming SSH connections:

sudo ufw allow 22
sudo ufw allow 11211

Step 5. Installing Memcached extension for PHP.

To use Memcached as a caching database for your PHP application such as WordPress or many more, You will also need to install the required PHP extension for Memcached:

sudo apt install php-memcached

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

systemctl restart apache2

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS  (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Memcached website.