Running the LAMP

Whats a LAMP?

What is a LAMP may you ask? It gives light so you may read… and it can sit on the floor, OK, I’m kidding. It’s a server LAMP.
Its a set, or stack of webserver technologies (mouseover to see the definitions) and it is one of the most popular, reliable, and easy to maintain ones.
In terms with the rest of our Ubuntu series, I will use the Linux distribution of Ubuntu for this demonstration.

How do I install it?

With Ubuntu server edition, nearly all this software is preinstalled, however, with the desktop edition, it is a quick install.
To install the LAMP stack into Ubuntu, type sudo tasksel install lamp-server, this is the easiest wizard install method. If you have any problems wit this, look at this great wiki post.
Now to the fun stuff, tinkering and trobleshooting.

Tinkering and Troubleshooting

When you first install it, you’ll probably want to install a few basic tools and see how it all works!
If you want to just put up a simple webpage and see how it looks, put a .html page in the default webroot (/var/www/) and go to http://localhost/ to see this.

Installing Addons

The best way to add on something to a webserver is sudo get-apt install {App Name}. It’s also useful for installing applications in Ubuntu’s repository.

For instance, to install phpmyadmin, a great mysql administration tool, type sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin, (if it doesn’t work, try adding an empty folder called phpmyadmin to your docroot (Typically: /var/www/).

That’s All?

For this issue, yes, however, I will release consecutive articles following the process. The next regards advanced configuration, additional services, such as Ruby on Rails.

Restarting after configuring

To restart, stop or start the apache service, type sudo service apache2 restart (restart can be stop or start too). Also, beware of running commands as sudo, they allow you to make changes to your base configuration, which most of this stuff is. Never type anything with sudo and/or rm in it.