Installing the LAMP stack on Debian Wheezy

Otherwise known as a LAMP server, the LAMP software stack consists of GNU\Linux as the operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySql for a database, and PHP (or possibly Pearl or Python) as the programming language used to host a Web application.

I’m going to assume a minimal install (I’ll be using debian-7.6.0-i386-CD-1.iso)
[http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd].

First we’ll need to make sure we have all the necessary repos in our
/etc/apt/sources.list file. If you installed from a complete
installation image you probably won’t need to mess with this, but
cat out the sources list and make sure you have the following or
something simialr.

root@debian32-base:# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

Okay, now update apt and install our software packages.
You will need to set a password for MySql’s root user.

root@debian32-base:# apt-get update
---output omitted---
root@debian32-base:~# apt-get install apache2 mysql-client mysql-server php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libaio1 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
  libaprutil1-ldap libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl libmysqlclient18 libonig2 libqdbm14
  mysql-client-5.5 mysql-common mysql-server-5.5 mysql-server-core-5.5 php5-cli php5-common ssl-cert
Suggested packages:
  apache2-doc apache2-suexec apache2-suexec-custom php-pear libipc-sharedcache-perl libterm-readkey-perl tinyca
  openssl-blacklist
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libaio1 libapache2-mod-php5 libapr1
  libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libhtml-template-perl
  libmysqlclient18 libonig2 libqdbm14 mysql-client mysql-client-5.5 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.5
  mysql-server-core-5.5 php5 php5-cli php5-common ssl-cert
0 upgraded, 27 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 16.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 115 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
Get:1 http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates/main mysql-common all 5.5.38-0+wheezy1 [78.6 kB]
---output omited---

Right about now, you get hit with the ncurses screen


And then the installation will finish uninterrupted

---output omitted---
Creating config file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini with new version
[ ok ] Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting .
Setting up libhtml-template-perl (2.91-1) ...
Setting up mysql-client (5.5.38-0+wheezy1) ...
Setting up mysql-server (5.5.38-0+wheezy1) ...
Setting up php5 (5.4.4-14+deb7u12) ...
Setting up php5-cli (5.4.4-14+deb7u12) ...

Creating config file /etc/php5/cli/php.ini with new version
update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/php5 to provide /usr/bin/php (php) in auto mode
Setting up ssl-cert (1.0.32) ...
root@debian32-base:~# 

Now you should be able to navigate to the server with a Web Browser. Just type
the computer’s IP address into the address bar.


What we don’t know for sure at this point is if PHP is working. Let’s rename
the default index.html file to a PHP file (index.php)
(FYI: to rename in the terminal, we use the move mv command).
Then we can open it with a text editor and add some PHP code and see if it’s
working.

root@debian32-base:~# mv /var/www/index.html /var/www/index.php
root@debian32-base:~# vim /var/www/index.php
<html><body><h1>It works!</h1>
<p>This is the default web page for this server.</p
<p>The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.</p>
</body>
<?php echo('Hello World'); ?>
</html>

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