AWS Server Installation

 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu-22-04


https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-secure-phpmyadmin-on-ubuntu-22-04


https://askubuntu.com/questions/306094/phpmyadmin-throws-a-404-on-opening



Introduction

A “LAMP” stack is a group of open source software that is typically installed together in order to enable a server to host dynamic websites and web apps written in PHP. This term is an acronym which represents the Linux operating system with the Apache web server. The site data is stored in a MySQL database, and dynamic content is processed by PHP.

In this guide, you’ll set up a LAMP stack on an Ubuntu 22.04 server.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this tutorial, you will need to have an Ubuntu 22.04 server with a non-root sudo-enabled user account and a basic firewall. This can be configured using our initial server setup guide for Ubuntu 22.04.

Step 1 — Installing Apache and Updating the Firewall

The Apache web server is among the most popular web servers in the world. It’s well documented, has an active community of users, and has been in wide use for much of the history of the web, which makes it a great choice for hosting a website.

Start by updating the package manager cache. If this is the first time you’re using sudo within this session, you’ll be prompted to provide your user’s password to confirm you have the right privileges to manage system packages with apt:

  1. sudo apt update

Then, install Apache with:

  1. sudo apt install apache2

You’ll be prompted to confirm Apache’s installation. Confirm by pressing Y, then ENTER.

Once the installation is finished, you’ll need to adjust your firewall settings to allow HTTP traffic. Ubuntu’s default firewall configuration tool is called Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW). It has different application profiles that you can leverage. To list all currently available UFW application profiles, execute this command:

  1. sudo ufw app list
Output
Available applications: Apache Apache Full Apache Secure OpenSSH

Here’s what each of these profiles mean:

  • Apache: This profile opens only port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic).
  • Apache Full: This profile opens both port 80 (normal, unencrypted web traffic) and port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic).
  • Apache Secure: This profile opens only port 443 (TLS/SSL encrypted traffic).

For now, it’s best to allow only connections on port 80, since this is a fresh Apache installation and you don’t yet have a TLS/SSL certificate configured to allow for HTTPS traffic on your server.

To only allow traffic on port 80, use the Apache profile:

  1. sudo ufw allow in "Apache"

Verify the change with:

  1. sudo ufw status
Output
Status: active To Action From -- ------ ---- OpenSSH ALLOW Anywhere Apache ALLOW Anywhere OpenSSH (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) Apache (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)

Traffic on port 80 is now allowed through the firewall.

You can do a spot check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server’s public IP address in your web browser (view the note under the next heading to find out what your public IP address is if you do not have this information already):

http://your_server_ip

The default Ubuntu 22.04 Apache web page is there for informational and testing purposes. Below is an example of the Apache default web page:

Ubuntu 22.04 Apache default web page with an overview of your default configuration settings

If you can view this page, your web server is correctly installed and accessible through your firewall.

How To Find your Server’s Public IP Address

If you do not know what your server’s public IP address is, there are a number of ways to find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to your server through SSH.

There are a few different ways to do this from the command line. First, you could use the iproute2 tools to get your IP address by typing this:

  1. ip addr show ens3 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2; }' | sed 's/\/.*$//'

This will give you two or three lines back. They are all correct addresses, but your computer may only be able to use one of them, so feel free to try each one.

An alternative method is to use the curl utility to contact an outside party to tell you how it sees your server. This is done by asking a specific server what your IP address is:

  1. curl http://icanhazip.com

Whichever method you choose, type in your IP address into your web browser to verify that your server is running.

Step 2 — Installing MySQL

Now that you have a web server up and running, you need to install the database system to be able to store and manage data for your site. MySQL is a popular database management system used within PHP environments.

Again, use apt to acquire and install this software:

  1. sudo apt install mysql-server

When prompted, confirm installation by typing Y, and then ENTER.

When the installation is finished, it’s recommended that you run a security script that comes pre-installed with MySQL. This script will remove some insecure default settings and lock down access to your database system.

Warning: As of July 2022, an error will occur when you run the mysql_secure_installation script without some further configuration. The reason is that this script will attempt to set a password for the installation’s root MySQL account but, by default on Ubuntu installations, this account is not configured to connect using a password.

Prior to July 2022, this script would silently fail after attempting to set the root account password and continue on with the rest of the prompts. However, as of this writing the script will return the following error after you enter and confirm a password:

Output
... Failed! Error: SET PASSWORD has no significance for user 'root'@'localhost' as the authentication method used doesn't store authentication data in the MySQL server. Please consider using ALTER USER instead if you want to change authentication parameters. New password:

This will lead the script into a recursive loop which you can only get out of by closing your terminal window.

Because the mysql_secure_installation script performs a number of other actions that are useful for keeping your MySQL installation secure, it’s still recommended that you run it before you begin using MySQL to manage your data. To avoid entering this recursive loop, though, you’ll need to first adjust how your root MySQL user authenticates.

First, open up the MySQL prompt:

  1. sudo mysql

Then run the following ALTER USER command to change the root user’s authentication method to one that uses a password. The following example changes the authentication method to mysql_native_password:

  1. ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

After making this change, exit the MySQL prompt:

  1. exit

Following that, you can run the mysql_secure_installation script without issue.

Start the interactive script by running:

  1. sudo mysql_secure_installation

This will ask if you want to configure the VALIDATE PASSWORD PLUGIN.

Note: Enabling this feature is something of a judgment call. If enabled, passwords which don’t match the specified criteria will be rejected by MySQL with an error. It is safe to leave validation disabled, but you should always use strong, unique passwords for database credentials.

Answer Y for yes, or anything else to continue without enabling.

VALIDATE PASSWORD PLUGIN can be used to test passwords
and improve security. It checks the strength of password
and allows the users to set only those passwords which are
secure enough. Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin?

Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No:

If you answer “yes”, you’ll be asked to select a level of password validation. Keep in mind that if you enter 2 for the strongest level, you will receive errors when attempting to set any password which does not contain numbers, upper and lowercase letters, and special characters:

There are three levels of password validation policy:

LOW    Length >= 8
MEDIUM Length >= 8, numeric, mixed case, and special characters
STRONG Length >= 8, numeric, mixed case, special characters and dictionary              file

Please enter 0 = LOW, 1 = MEDIUM and 2 = STRONG: 1

Regardless of whether you chose to set up the VALIDATE PASSWORD PLUGIN, your server will next ask you to select and confirm a password for the MySQL root user. This is not to be confused with the system root. The database root user is an administrative user with full privileges over the database system. Even though the default authentication method for the MySQL root user doesn’t involve using a password, even when one is set, you should define a strong password here as an additional safety measure.

If you enabled password validation, you’ll be shown the password strength for the root password you just entered and your server will ask if you want to continue with that password. If you are happy with your current password, enter Y for “yes” at the prompt:

Estimated strength of the password: 100 
Do you wish to continue with the password provided?(Press y|Y for Yes, any other key for No) : y

For the rest of the questions, press Y and hit the ENTER key at each prompt. This will remove some anonymous users and the test database, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes you have made.

When you’re finished, test whether you’re able to log in to the MySQL console by typing:

  1. sudo mysql

This will connect to the MySQL server as the administrative database user root, which is inferred by the use of sudo when running this command. Below is an example output:

Output
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 10 Server version: 8.0.28-0ubuntu4 (Ubuntu) Copyright (c) 2000, 2022, Oracle and/or its affiliates. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement. mysql>

To exit the MySQL console, type:

  1. exit

Notice that you didn’t need to provide a password to connect as the root user, even though you have defined one when running the mysql_secure_installation script. That is because the default authentication method for the administrative MySQL user is unix_socket instead of password. Even though this might seem like a security concern, it makes the database server more secure because the only users allowed to log in as the root MySQL user are the system users with sudo privileges connecting from the console or through an application running with the same privileges. In practical terms, that means you won’t be able to use the administrative database root user to connect from your PHP application. Setting a password for the root MySQL account works as a safeguard, in case the default authentication method is changed from unix_socket to password.

For increased security, it’s best to have dedicated user accounts with less expansive privileges set up for every database, especially if you plan on having multiple databases hosted on your server.

Note: There are some older versions of PHP that doesn’t support caching_sha2_password, the default authentication method for MySQL 8. For that reason, when creating database users for PHP applications on MySQL 8, you may need to configure your application to use the mysql_native_password plug-in instead. This tutorial will demonstrate how to do that in Step 6.

Your MySQL server is now installed and secured. Next, you’ll install PHP, the final component in the LAMP stack.

Step 3 — Installing PHP

You have Apache installed to serve your content and MySQL installed to store and manage your data. PHP is the component of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content to the final user. In addition to the php package, you’ll need php-mysql, a PHP module that allows PHP to communicate with MySQL-based databases. You’ll also need libapache2-mod-php to enable Apache to handle PHP files. Core PHP packages will automatically be installed as dependencies.

To install these packages, run the following command:

  1. sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

Once the installation is finished, run the following command to confirm your PHP version:

  1. php -v
Output
PHP 8.1.2 (cli) (built: Mar 4 2022 18:13:46) (NTS) Copyright (c) The PHP Group Zend Engine v4.1.2, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies with Zend OPcache v8.1.2, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

At this point, your LAMP stack is fully operational, but before testing your setup with a PHP script, it’s best to set up a proper Apache Virtual Host to hold your website’s files and folders.

Step 4 — Creating a Virtual Host for your Website

When using the Apache web server, you can create virtual hosts (similar to server blocks in Nginx) to encapsulate configuration details and host more than one domain from a single server. In this guide, we’ll set up a domain called your_domain, but you should replace this with your own domain name.

Note: In case you are using DigitalOcean as DNS hosting provider, check out our product documentation for detailed instructions on how to set up a new domain name and point it to your server.

Apache on Ubuntu 22.04 has one virtual host enabled by default that is configured to serve documents from the /var/www/html directory. While this works well for a single site, it can become unwieldy if you are hosting multiple sites. Instead of modifying /var/www/html, we’ll create a directory structure within /var/www for the your_domain site, leaving /var/www/html in place as the default directory to be served if a client request doesn’t match any other sites.

Create the directory for your_domain as follows:

  1. sudo mkdir /var/www/your_domain

Next, assign ownership of the directory with the $USER environment variable, which will reference your current system user:

  1. sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/your_domain

Then, open a new configuration file in Apache’s sites-available directory using your preferred command-line editor. Here, we’ll use nano:

  1. sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf

This will create a new blank file. Add in the following bare-bones configuration with your own domain name:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/your_domain.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName your_domain
    ServerAlias www.your_domain 
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/your_domain
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file when you’re done. If you’re using nano, do that by pressing CTRL+X, then Y and ENTER.

With this VirtualHost configuration, we’re telling Apache to serve your_domain using /var/www/your_domain as the web root directory. If you’d like to test Apache without a domain name, you can remove or comment out the options ServerName and ServerAlias by adding a pound sign (#) the beginning of each option’s lines.

Now, use a2ensite to enable the new virtual host:

  1. sudo a2ensite your_domain

You might want to disable the default website that comes installed with Apache. This is required if you’re not using a custom domain name, because in this case Apache’s default configuration would override your virtual host. To disable Apache’s default website, type:

  1. sudo a2dissite 000-default

To make sure your configuration file doesn’t contain syntax errors, run the following command:

  1. sudo apache2ctl configtest

Finally, reload Apache so these changes take effect:

  1. sudo systemctl reload apache2

Your new website is now active, but the web root /var/www/your_domain is still empty. Create an index.html file in that location to test that the virtual host works as expected:

  1. nano /var/www/your_domain/index.html

Include the following content in this file:

/var/www/your_domain/index.html
<html>
  <head>
    <title>your_domain website</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World!</h1>

    <p>This is the landing page of <strong>your_domain</strong>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Save and close the file, then go to your browser and access your server’s domain name or IP address:

http://server_domain_or_IP

Your web page should reflect the contents in the file you just edited:

Apache virtual host test landing page that reveals your HTML code to the user

You can leave this file in place as a temporary landing page for your application until you set up an index.php file to replace it. Once you do that, remember to remove or rename the index.html file from your document root, as it would take precedence over an index.php file by d

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