Setup Apache2, MySQL and PHP5 on Ubuntu linux

Last weekend I decided to give a purpose to an old PC (Pentium III with 128MB RAM and 30GB HD) on which a few months ago I installed Ubuntu Server 6.0.6. As always what I was missing was an offline test environment that allowed me to try the changes and new features to be added to my site not make them hot, I needed to install and configure Apache2, MySQL and PHP5.


Starting from a guide on html.it, here is the steps I followed:

• Update list of available packages (it is always good practice to do before the new facilities):

   sudo apt-get update 

• Installing Apache2:

   sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork 

• Installing MySQL:

   sudo apt-get install mysql-server 

• Install the PHP5 module for Apache2:

   sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 

• Installing the library to use MySQL from PHP5:

   sudo apt-get install php5-mysql 

• Installing PHP library for image manipulation:

   sudo apt-get install php5-gd 

• Installing the PHP library to run PHP also from the command line:

   sudo apt-get install php5-cli 

• Activating the extension on the MySQL configuration file PHP5:

   vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini 

  Review of the line

   ;extension=mysql.so 

  in

   extension=mysql.so 

• Restarting Apache2:

   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart 

Then to test that everything worked properly, I proceeded as follows:

Test integration between Apache2 and PHP5

Creating the test_php.php in / var / www with the following content:

 <?php phpinfo();?> 

With access to a browser 'http://servername/test_php.php URL (where servername is the ip address or the name of the linux server) and check delal display configuration information for PHP5

Test of between PHP5 and MySQL

Create a test db in MySQL:

 mysqladmin -u root create test 

Creating the test_mysql.php in / var / www with the following content:

 <?php $link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '') or die('Connessione fallita: ' . mysql_error()); mysql_select_db('test') or die('Selezione DB fallita: ' . mysql_error()); echo 'OK'; mysql_close($link); ?> 

With access to a browser 'http://servername/test_mysql.php URL (where servername is the ip address or the name of the linux server) and verify the message "OK" indicating that the connection to DB "test" is been successful.