How To Install LAMP Server on Debian 9

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the LAMP server on your Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, LAMP (a server stack) represents a full-featured stack containing the most popular web server known as Apache, the most popular database server MySQL and the most popular open-source web programming language known as PHP. All components are free and open-source software, and the combination is suitable for building dynamic web pages.

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 LAMP Stack on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• 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 LAMP Server on Debian 9 Stretch

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

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Apache on Debian 9 Stretch.

We will be installing Apache with apt-get, which is the default package manager for Debian:

apt-get install apache2

After installing apache services on your system, start all required services:

systemctl enable apache2
systemctl start apache2
systemctl status apache2

Allow Apache HTTP server via the firewall:

ufw status
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw reload
ufw enable

You can verify that Apache is really running by opening your favorite web browser and entering the URL http://your-server's-address, if it is installed, then you will see this:

Step 3. Installing MariaDB on Debian 9 Stretch.

Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MariaDB. MariaDB is a database management system. Basically, it will organize and provide access to databases where our site can store information:

sudo apt-get install mariadb-server

Once complete, you can verify MariaDB is installed by running the below command:

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl status mariadb

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

To log into MariaDB, use the following command (note that it’s the same command you would use to log into a MySQL database):

mysql -u root -p

Step 4. Installing PHP 7 on Debian 9 Stretch.

By default Apache server supports the .html only not PHP, for that you need to install PHP and the PHP extension package for the MariaDB server. Here, we will install PHP 7 on Debian 9.

apt-get install php php-mysql

Your server should restart Apache automatically after the installation of both MariaDB and PHP. If it doesn’t, execute this command:

systemctl restart apache2
systemctl restart mariadb

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/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 the LAMP server. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing LAMP (Linux Apache, MySQL, and PHP) in Debian 9 (Stretch) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Apache, MySQL, and PHP website.

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