This guide provides step by step instructions for installing a full featured LAMP stack on an Ubuntu 12.04 (Oneiric) system.

In this guide, you will be instructed on setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP. If you don't feel that you will need MySQL or PHP, please don't feel obligated to install them. Make sure you're logged into your Linode as the "root" user via SSH before proceeding with these instructions.

apt-get install apache2

First, create a file in the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory for each virtual host that you want to set up. Name each file with the domain for which you want to provide virtual hosting. See the following example configurations for the hypothetical "example.com" and "example.org" domains. Substitute your own domain names for those shown below.

File:/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
     ServerName example.com
     ServerAlias www.example.com
     DocumentRoot /srv/www/example.com/public_html/
     ErrorLog /srv/www/example.com/logs/error.log
     CustomLog /srv/www/example.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

File:/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.org

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
     ServerName example.org
     ServerAlias www.example.org
     DocumentRoot /srv/www/example.org/public_html/
     ErrorLog /srv/www/example.org/logs/error.log
     CustomLog /srv/www/example.org/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Notes regarding this example configuration:

• All of the files for the sites that you host will be located in directories that exist underneath /srv/www. You can symbolically link these directories into other locations if you need them to exist in other places.
• ErrorLog and CustomLog entries are suggested for more fine-grained logging, but are not required. If they are defined (as shown above), the logs directories must be created before you restart Apache.

Before you can use the above configuration, you'll need to create the specified directories. For the above configuration, you can do this with the following commands. Substitute your own domain names for those shown below.

mkdir -p /srv/www/example.com/public_html
mkdir /srv/www/example.com/logs

mkdir -p /srv/www/example.org/public_html mkdir /srv/www/example.org/logs After you've set up your virtual hosts, issue the following commands:

a2ensite example.com
a2ensite example.org

This command symbolically links your virtual host file from sites-available to the sites-enabled directory. Finally, before you can access your sites you must reload Apache with the following command:

service apache2 reload

Assuming that you have configured the DNS for your domain to point to your Linode's IP address, Virtual hosting for your domain should now work.

The a2dissite command is the inverse of a2ensite. For example, if you wanted to disable the example.com site, you would issue the following command:

a2dissite example.com

After enabling, disabling, or modifying any part of your Apache configuration, you will need to reload the Apache configuration again with the "service apache2 reload" command. You can create as many virtual hosting files as you need to support the domains that you want to host with your Linode.

apt-get install mysql-server

At this point MySQL should be ready to configure and run. While you shouldn't need to change the configuration file, note that it is located at /etc/mysql/my.cnf for future reference.

mysql_secure_installation

mysql -u root -p

To create a database and grant your users permissions on it, issue the following command. Note, the semi-colons (;) at the end of the lines are crucial for ending the commands. Your command should look like this:

create database lollipop;
grant all on lollipop.* to 'foreman' identified by '5t1ck';
flush privileges;

In the example above, lollipop is the name of the database, foreman is the username, and 5t1ck is the password. Note that database user names and passwords are only used by scripts connecting to the database, and that database user account names need not (and perhaps should not) represent actual user accounts on the system.

With that completed, you've successfully configured MySQL and you may now pass these database credentials on to your users. To exit the MySQL database administration utility issue the following command:

quit

With Apache and MySQL installed you are now ready to move on to installing PHP to provide scripting support for your web pages.

Ubuntu includes packages for installing PHP from the terminal. Issue the following command:

apt-get install php5 php-pear

Once PHP5 is installed, you'll need to tune the configuration file located in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to enable more descriptive errors, logging, and better performance. These modifications provide a good starting point if you're unfamiliar with PHP configuration.

Make sure that the following values are set, and relevant lines are uncommented (comments are lines beginning with a semi-colon (;)):

File excerpt:/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

max_execution_time = 30
memory_limit = 64M
error_reporting = E_COMPILE_ERROR|E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR|E_ERROR|E_CORE_ERROR
display_errors = Off
log_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/php.log
register_globals = Off

After making changes to the PHP configuration file, restart Apache by issuing the following command:

service apache2 restart

If you need support for MySQL in PHP, then you must install the php5-mysql package with the following command:

apt-get install php5-mysql

To install the php5-suhosin package, which provides additional security for PHP 5 applications (recommended), issue the following command:

apt-get install php5-suhosin

Restart Apache to make sure everything is loaded correctly:

service apache2 restart

Congratulations! You've set up a LAMP server on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric). Happy serving!