Apache, MySQL, and PHP have become one of the most utilized combinations for developing content driven websites. That being said, lets get to building a web server. This tutorial is designed to guide you through the initial steps of setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Linux. The Linux distribution being utilized for this tutorial is Fedora Core 1, however the steps should be very similar across most distros.
Installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The article talks about setting up these tools, but basically just handles how to compile and install them. That is not what I consider setup, and to give the impression that that’s all you need to do, is really not recommended.
Only a very small percentage of users install these applications themselves, and even less compile them from source. There is very little need to do that nowadays and publishing articles how to do that makes Linux and its tools look outdated and user-hostile, especially since the article doesn’t say that You Really Do Not Need To Bother (TM).
A much more meaningful approach would have been to make a clear guide how to set these up in a secure way. Many LAMP setups are vulnerable due ignorant users and bad configuration, since users are too lazy or confused to learn the zillion options and switches that are available.
i disagree.
it’s a good basic tutorial. tutorials aren’t meant for someone to bring up a production server following said tutorial. tutorials are for learning and practice.
>>only a very small percentage of users install these applications themselves
well, this is osnews. it’s not developer-news, or webadmin-news.
for newbies, going through the tutorial will be beneficial. they cover a lot of ground(for newbies).
-some command line navigation
-extracting tarballs
-standard compiling
-how do you start stuff
a lot of newbs don’t have a feel for what’s happening at the nuts & bolts level.
sure they could use redhat’s equivalent of add/remove software…but what will they learn from that?
I also must disagree.
I think it’s silly people shouldn’t publish articles on how to setup things under Linux “the hard way” because it’ll turn off new users??
And personally, I compile most of the software I run under Linux. I don’t really care for the packages included in most of the distros out there.
When I compile it and install it myself, I know exactly what’s going on, exactly where everything is, etc…
I swear, it seems like every distro installs stuff all over the place. sometimes it’s difficult to figure out where they put the stuff!
Thus doing it yourself is MUCH easier…
As for articles like this scaring off new Linux users… Well if all the technical articles related to Windows haven’t scared away users from Windows so far, I don’t think there’s much to worry about.
For newbies. Given the title, and the first three lines, it’s up tp my expectations.
This topic was covered on the linux forum.
Part II — Administration
Part III — Security
Part IV — Optimizing
compiling urself is useless without code auditing and who in their right mind would do that.
well, this is osnews. it’s not developer-news, or webadmin-news.
It is not “newbie-software-install-news” either is it?
I think the tutorial is quite useless, it tells you step by step what to do, but other than that it doesn’t say much at all. You might as well just read the intall instructions shipped with the software.
It doesn’t even come with a single argument why he didn’t want to use binary packages, other than “it works better”, which i personally think is bollocks.
Now i can understand that people would want to play with installing software from source, i personally used to run LFS because of the same. But the argument that is should “magically” work better because you compiled it for your machine is just not true.
When I compile it and install it myself, I know exactly what’s going on, exactly where everything is, etc…
Really? Thats funny, i hate installing software from source because i then *dont* know where it puts everything, and whatever upgrading it later will work correctly. (or if i can even uninstall it again) Or maybe you install everything in its own directory? In that case yes, one would know where everything is, but i find that to be majorly inconvinient.
I swear, it seems like every distro installs stuff all over the place. sometimes it’s difficult to figure out where they put the stuff!
All the distros i have tried for a long time put everything in /usr. I can’t see how that is difficult to figure out, nor can i see why i should really care anyway, since the package manager takes care of everything.
Thus doing it yourself is MUCH easier…
Yeah right.
I think we, (as in we, I mean the educated, so that ‘we’ may not apply to you), shouldn’t teach the uneducated, (education != intelligence), the quality products, instead of what the mass suggests.
I learned on MySQL, Php, Apache and Linux too, and I thought that was the quality, until I started researching. After 3 years with these products, I’ve moved on to: PostgreSQL, PHP, Apache and FreeBSD. I am currently reseraching alternatives to PHP now, and most likely will try Python.
I’m glad that I had a place to start, but would have much perfered it if people at the time had pushed me to the quality products.
Replace the first “shouldn’t”, with “should”
I’m glad that I had a place to start, but would have much perfered it if people at the time had pushed me to the quality products.
And who is to decide what is the quality products? I for one do not consider freebsd better than linux, nor do i consider it worse.
Yes postgres is better and more advanced than mysql, but it is also quite a lot more difficult to learn and manage, and might be overkill for many things.
Whats wrong with PHP? Sure better things exists if you need to build very complex things, but that doesn’t mean PHP is bad at what it does.
Its all about using the right tool for the right job, if you think you can switch to the one perfect tool, then i am afraid that you still have a lot to learn 🙂
“I’m glad that I had a place to start, but would have much perfered it if people at the time had pushed me to the quality products.”
Because I would much rather prefer to have someone else tell me what to use. That way I don’t have to make a decision for myself.
How can you honestly make an informed decision unless you try something.
I think the tutorial is quite useless
So what? if the tutorial is not useful for you, press “back” in your browser and get off, it might be useful for someone else. Even if it’s useless for 99.9% of the people, what’s the problem? The article is not hosted in your hard disk, is not killing your bandwith.
“Yes postgres is better and more advanced than mysql, but it is also quite a lot more difficult to learn and manage, and might be overkill for many things.”
People who have come in contact with both postgresql and mysql have favored pgsql as it is more standards compliant and also have much richer feature set. Things like triggers and stored procedures, subqueries, schemas and views are quite useful but missing in MySQL. Even MySQL AB realizes this, and have now incorporated SAPdb into its product line under the name of Maxdb. Simple as in lack of feature, is not always the same as simple for the user (the user in this case would be the database programmer). If this was the case we would still use edlin or vi instead of some nice office suit when writing our documents.
“Whats wrong with PHP? Sure better things exists if you need to build very complex things, but that doesn’t mean PHP is bad at what it does.”
The main thing that is wrong with PHP is it’s lack of namespaces. There is only so many names for an application or a library you could dream up. As a result you see a lot of finished applications that use PHP but compared to java, perl and others that have this feature, the number of class libraris or components available to php developers are quite small. This makes PHP developers constantly reinvent the wheel. Other than that PHP is a nice object oriented language. It works well for what it was originally inteded for but not for larger projekts. But its not harder to learn java/jsp than to learn PHP but they scale better, so why bother spending time on learning the inferior tool.
“Its all about using the right tool for the right job”
Could certainly agree with that. The problem is that it is hard to find the right job for some tools. E.g. who needs a plastic hammer that break in two as soon as you try it on a nail.
“But its not harder to learn java/jsp than to learn PHP but they scale better, so why bother spending time on learning the inferior tool.”
My personal guess is that PHP will grow to replace server-side java before 2010.
All these languages for serverside use seam to converge to having about the same feature set. Today java and C# competes for the coolest features, the current leader in that area right now is probably C# and it will remain leader until Jdk 1.5 gets released in a couple of months. There is no reason to believe that PHP not could take part in that competition, perhps we will see PHP.net. By the look of it PHP has already entered into that competion the PHP5 is stunningly similar to java. That is similar to C#…
Who knows who will win this competition in the end.
But as of today the problem of writing independent class libraries (due to lack of namespaces) in PHP gives it a great handicap in this race. I just wish they had included it in PHP5
i am pretty new to linux. i tried to install this three on my red hat 7.3 i could not. some wired problem. anyway it might have been my fault.
So what? if the tutorial is not useful for you, press “back” in your browser and get off, it might be useful for someone else. Even if it’s useless for 99.9% of the people, what’s the problem? The article is not hosted in your hard disk, is not killing your bandwith.
Rodviking gets the bigger picture. When an article is written (no matter the content), if it helps at least ONE person, then it was well worth writing. You cannot possibly please everyone and that’s not the point in the first place. When an article is written, it’s usually somebody who is sitting there thinking “I wish I had something like this when… [fill in the rest]”, not “I hope I can make all the nerds out there happy with this topic”. I know that personally I didn’t find this article in line with my skill level so I didn’t read it. Simple as that. Rod is right.. there is a nice back button on every browser for just this reason. I think the X in the window border does well too.
To all the negative posts: I think we should all be happy that there are people out there who still care enough to write for us… for free I assume. Those same people have to endure all of the shit we throw at them every time a piece is written. You have to be pretty thick skinned to deal with a bunch like us. Maybe some appreciation is in order.
>well, this is osnews. it’s not developer-news, or webadmin-news.
OSNews is a lot more than just OS news. In fact, 90% of our readership are developers of some kind according to our last survey. So yeah, OSNews is a lot more than just “OS news”, it is whatever want it to be.
Even if it’s useless for 99.9% of the people, what’s the problem? The article is not hosted in your hard disk, is not killing your bandwith.
And it didn’t keep me awake at night either, etc. But the point is that if too many articles are useless to too many osnews readers, then those readers wont come back and the target audience will shift. I think feedback, both positive and negative, can help prevent that. And i like the fact that osnews is not yet another newbie site.
So yes, i think this article has a place, but i just don’t think it is on osnews.
And no, this doesn’t mean that i want to only see content that is of interest to me personally, there is a lot of content here that doesn’t interest me, but which i still think fits in just fine.
But i can’t see how a howto basically describing how to do a ./configure, make, make install, really fits in, especially not considering that the docs shipped with said programs does an equally good job explaining it. Now if it had actually covered some of the more non-trivial parts…
So-so tutorial. Why is he using tarballs when you’ve got yum?
I mean, the tutorial should have been this:
1. Become root
2. yum install apache mysql php
3. start->system settings->server settings->services
4. check off and hit start on httpd and mysql
OK, sure, you could argue that “yum isn’t portable”. But the fact is, it’s a rare distro where the appropriate install method is a tarball. This isn’t about newbie-ness in my eyes, but rather giving people the wrong directions.
-Erwos
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http://www.apachetoolbox.com