How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL,

PHP (LAMP) Stack on Ubuntu 22.04

Published on April 26, 2022
By Kong Yang and Erika Heidi

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:

$ sudo apt update

Then, install Apache with:

$ 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:

$ 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:

$ sudo ufw allow in "Apache"

Verify the change with:

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

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:

$ 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:

$ 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:
> ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password
BY 'password';

After making this change, exit the MySQL prompt:

> exit

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

Start the interactive script by running:

$ 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:

$ 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:

> 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:

$ sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

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

$ 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:

$ sudo mkdir /var/www/your_domain

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

$ 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:

$ 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:

$ 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:

$ sudo a2dissite 000-default

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

$ sudo apache2ctl configtest

Finally, reload Apache so these changes take effect:

$ 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:

$ 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:

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 default.

A Note About DirectoryIndex on Apache

With the default DirectoryIndex settings on Apache, a file

named index.html will always take precedence over an index.php file. This is
useful for setting up maintenance pages in PHP applications, by creating a
temporary index.html file containing an informative message to visitors.
Because this page will take precedence over the index.php page, it will then
become the landing page for the application. Once maintenance is over,
the index.html is renamed or removed from the document root, bringing back
the regular application page.
In case you want to change this behavior, you’ll need to edit
the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf file and modify the order in which
the index.php file is listed within the DirectoryIndex directive:

$ sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf

 /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml
index.htm
</IfModule>

After saving and closing the file, you’ll need to reload Apache so the changes
take effect:

$ sudo systemctl reload apache2

In the next step, we’ll create a PHP script to test that PHP is correctly installed
and configured on your server.

Step 5 — Testing PHP Processing on your Web Server

Now that you have a custom location to host your website’s files and folders,
create a PHP test script to confirm that Apache is able to handle and process
requests for PHP files.

Create a new file named info.php inside your custom web root folder:

$ nano /var/www/your_domain/info.php

This will open a blank file. Add the following text, which is valid PHP code,
inside the file:
/var/www/your_domain/info.php
<?php
phpinfo();

When you are finished, save and close the file.

To test this script, go to your web browser and access your server’s domain
name or IP address, followed by the script name, which in this case
is info.php:
http://server_domain_or_IP/info.php
Here is an example of the default PHP web page:

This page provides information about your server from the perspective of
PHP. It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being
applied correctly.

If you see this page in your browser, then your PHP installation is working as
expected.

After checking the relevant information about your PHP server through that
page, it’s best to remove the file you created as it contains sensitive
information about your PHP environment and your Ubuntu server. Use rm to
do so:
 $ sudo rm /var/www/your_domain/info.php

You can always recreate this page if you need to access the information again
later.

Step 6 — Testing Database Connection from PHP

(Optional)
If you want to test whether PHP is able to connect to MySQL and execute
database queries, you can create a test table with test data and query for its
contents from a PHP script. Before you do that, you need to create a test
database and a new MySQL user properly configured to access it.

Create a database named example_database and a user

named example_user. You can replace these names with different values.
First, connect to the MySQL console using the root account:

$ sudo mysql

To create a new database, run the following command from your MySQL
console:

> CREATE DATABASE example_database;

Now create a new user and grant them full privileges on the custom database
you’ve just created.

The following command creates a new user named example_user that

authenticates with the caching_sha2_password method. We’re defining this
user’s password as password, but you should replace this value with a secure
password of your own choosing.

> CREATE USER 'example_user'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Note: The previous ALTER USER statement sets the root MySQL user to authenticate with
the caching_sha2_password plugin. Per the official MySQL
documentation, caching_sha2_password is MySQL’s preferred authentication plugin, as it
provides more secure password encryption than the older, but still widely
used, mysql_native_password.
However, some versions of PHP don’t work reliably with caching_sha2_password. PHP
has reported that this issue was fixed as of PHP 7.4, but if you encounter an error when
trying to log in to phpMyAdmin later on, you may want to set root to authenticate
with mysql_native_password instead:
> ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password
BY 'password';

Now give this user permission over the example_database database:

> GRANT ALL ON example_database.* TO 'example_user'@'%';

This will give the example_user user full privileges over

the example_database database, while preventing this user from creating or
modifying other databases on your server.

Now exit the MySQL shell with:

> exit

Test if the new user has the proper permissions by logging in to the MySQL
console again, this time using the custom user credentials:

$ mysql -u example_user -p

Notice the -p flag in this command, which will prompt you for the password
used when creating the example_user user. After logging in to the MySQL
console, confirm that you have access to the example_database database:

> SHOW DATABASES;

This will give you the following output:

Output
+--------------------+
| Database |
+--------------------+
| example_database |
| information_schema |
+--------------------+
2 rows in set (0.000 sec)
Next, create a test table named todo_list. From the MySQL console, run the
following statement:
> CREATE TABLE example_database.todo_list (
item_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
content VARCHAR(255),
PRIMARY KEY(item_id)
);

Insert a few rows of content in the test table. Repeat the next command a few
times, using different values, to populate your test table:

> INSERT INTO example_database.todo_list (content) VALUES ("My first

important item");

To confirm that the data was successfully saved to your table, run:

> SELECT * FROM example_database.todo_list;

The following is the output:

Output
+---------+--------------------------+
| item_id | content |
+---------+--------------------------+
| 1 | My first important item |
| 2 | My second important item |
| 3 | My third important item |
| 4 | and this one more thing |
+---------+--------------------------+
4 rows in set (0.000 sec)

After confirming that you have valid data in your test table, exit the MySQL
console:
> exit

Now you can create the PHP script that will connect to MySQL and query for
your content. Create a new PHP file in your custom web root directory using
your preferred editor:

$ nano /var/www/your_domain/todo_list.php

The following PHP script connects to the MySQL database and queries for the
content of the todo_list table, exhibiting the results in a list. If there’s a
problem with the database connection, it will throw an exception.
Add this content into your todo_list.php script, remembering to replace
the example_user and password with your own:
/var/www/your_domain/todo_list.php
<?php
$user = "example_user";
$password = "password";
$database = "example_database";
$table = "todo_list";

try {
$db = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=$database", $user,
$password);
echo "<h2>TODO</h2><ol>";
foreach($db->query("SELECT content FROM $table") as $row) {
echo "<li>" . $row['content'] . "</li>";
}
echo "</ol>";
} catch (PDOException $e) {
print "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
die();
}
Save and close the file when you’re done editing.

You can now access this page in your web browser by visiting the domain
name or public IP address configured for your website, followed
by /todo_list.php:
http://your_domain_or_IP/todo_list.php

This web page should reveal the content you’ve inserted in your test table to
your visitor:

That means your PHP environment is ready to connect and interact with your
MySQL server.

Conclusion
In this guide, you’ve built a flexible foundation for serving PHP websites and
applications to your visitors, using Apache as a web server and MySQL as a
database system.

As an immediate next step, you should ensure that connections to your web
server are secured, by serving them via HTTPS. In order to accomplish that,
you can use Let’s Encrypt to secure your site with a free TLS/SSL certificate.