Installing LAMP on CentOS

LAMP is a classic open-source stack for running web applications. The name is an acronym for the four components that make it up:

• Linux — the operating system
• Apache — the web server
• MariaDB / MySQL — the database system
• PHP — the server-side scripting language

Update the package cache

Before installing anything, refresh the package repository metadata:

yum makecache

Installing Apache

yum install httpd

Installing MySQL

yum install mysql-server mysql-client

Once installed, start the service and set a root password:

/etc/init.d/mysqld start
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'your-password'

Installing PHP

yum install php php-mysql

This installs PHP along with a base set of extensions and the Apache PHP module.

Setting up virtual hosts

If you're planning to host more than one site on this server, you'll need a separate VirtualHost block for each one.

On CentOS, virtual host configs live in /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/. Create that directory:

mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/

Then tell Apache to load all config files from that directory by adding this line to the main Apache config:

Include sites-enabled/*.conf

Create a config file for your domain — naming it after the domain keeps things tidy:

touch /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/mysite.com.conf

Open the file in a text editor and add the following:

<VirtualHost 111.111.111.111:80>
    ServerName mysite.com
    ServerAlias www.mysite.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/sites/mysite.com
    CustomLog /var/www/httpd-logs/mysite.com.access.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/www/httpd-logs/mysite.com.error.log
    AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
</VirtualHost>

• Replace 111.111.111.111 with your server's actual IP address
• Replace mysite.com with your domain name

Creating a database

Connect to MySQL:

mysql -u root -p

Create a database and grant a user full access to it:

create database db;
grant all privileges on db.* to 'user'@'localhost' identified by 'password';

• db — your database name
• user — the database username
• password — the user's password

Creating site directories and installing a CMS

Create the directories for your site files and logs:

mkdir /var/www/sites/
mkdir /var/www/sites/mysite.com
mkdir /var/www/httpd-logs
touch /var/www/httpd-logs/mysite.com.access.log
touch /var/www/httpd-logs/mysite.com.error.log

Navigate to your site's directory and download your CMS of choice — here's WordPress as an example:

cd /var/www/sites/mysite.com
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip

Extract the archive:

unzip latest.zip

If your domain's DNS is already pointing to this server, open the site in a browser using your domain name to continue the installation. If DNS isn't set up yet, use your server's IP address instead.