How To Install Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached is a free and open-source in-memory caching service. Memory object caching systems like Memcached can optimize backend database performance by temporarily storing information in memory, and retaining frequently or recently requested records.

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 of the Memcached memory object caching system on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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).
• An active internet connection.
• 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 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

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 on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, Memcached is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest stable version of Memcached to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install memcached libmemcached-tools

After installation, start the Memcached service and enable it to start at reboot with the following command:

sudo systemctl start memcached
sudo systemctl enable memcached

Find out the installed version details of Memcached by using the command:

memcached --version

Step 3. Configure Memcached.

The Memcached default configuration file is located at /etc/memcached. You can edit it with the following command:

nano /etc/memcached.conf

Change the following values:

# Default connection port is 11211
-p 11211

-l your-server-ip-address

# Limit the number of simultaneous incoming connections. The daemon default is 1024
 -c 1024

Save and close the file, then restart the Memcached service to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart memcached

Step 4. Configure Firewall.

Now we set up an Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) with Apache to allow public access on default web ports for HTTP and HTTPS:

sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow 11211
sudo ufw enable

Step 5. Installing Memcached PHP Libraries.

If your application is PHP based such as WordPress and you want to connect Memcached as caching database then install php-memcached through the command below:

sudo apt install php-memcached apache2 libapache2-mod-php php php-cli php-memcached php-memcached

Finally, restart the Apache service to implement the changes:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Memcached. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Memcached on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Memcached website.