How to install and configure PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language well-suited for Web development since PHP scripts can be embedded into HTML. This guide explains how to install and configure PHP in an Ubuntu System with Apache2 and MySQL.
Prerequisites
Before installing PHP you should install Apache (or a preferred web server) and a database service such as MySQL.
- To install the Apache package, please refer to our Apache guide.
- To install and configure a MySQL database service, refer to our MySQL guide.
Install PHP
PHP is available on Ubuntu Linux, but unlike Python (which comes pre-installed), must be manually installed.
To install PHP – and the Apache PHP module – you can enter the following command into a terminal prompt:
sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php Install optional packages
The following packages are optional, and can be installed if you need them for your setup.
- PHP-CLI
You can run PHP scripts via the Command Line Interface (CLI). To do this, you must first install the php-cli package. You can install it by running the following command:
sudo apt install php-mysql sudo apt install php-pgsql Configure PHP
If you have installed the libapache2-mod-php or php-cgi packages, you can run PHP scripts from your web browser. If you have installed the php-cli package, you can run PHP scripts at a terminal prompt.
By default, when libapache2-mod-php is installed, the Apache2 web server is configured to run PHP scripts using this module. First, verify if the files /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php8.*.conf and /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php8.*.load exist. If they do not exist, you can enable the module using the a2enmod command.
Once you have installed the PHP-related packages and enabled the Apache PHP module, you should restart the Apache2 web server to run PHP scripts, by running the following command:
sudo systemctl restart apache2.service Test your setup
To verify your installation, you can run the following PHP phpinfo script:
You can save the content in a file – phpinfo.php for example – and place it under the DocumentRoot directory of the Apache2 web server. Pointing your browser to http://hostname/phpinfo.php will display the values of various PHP configuration parameters.
Further reading
- For more in depth information see the php.net documentation.
- There are a plethora of books on PHP 7 and PHP 8. A good book from O’Reilly is Learning PHP, which includes an exploration of PHP 7’s enhancements to the language.
- Also, see the Apache MySQL PHP Ubuntu Wiki page for more information.
Apache php config linux
This section contains notes and hints specific to Apache 2.x installs of PHP on Unix systems.
We do not recommend using a threaded MPM in production with Apache 2. Use the prefork MPM, which is the default MPM with Apache 2.0 and 2.2. For information on why, read the related FAQ entry on using Apache2 with a threaded MPM
The » Apache Documentation is the most authoritative source of information on the Apache 2.x server. More information about installation options for Apache may be found there.
The most recent version of Apache HTTP Server may be obtained from » Apache download site, and a fitting PHP version from the above mentioned places. This quick guide covers only the basics to get started with Apache 2.x and PHP. For more information read the » Apache Documentation. The version numbers have been omitted here, to ensure the instructions are not incorrect. In the examples below, ‘NN’ should be replaced with the specific version of Apache being used.
There are currently two versions of Apache 2.x — there’s 2.4 and 2.2. While there are various reasons for choosing each, 2.4 is the current latest version, and the one that is recommended, if that option is available to you. However, the instructions here will work for either 2.4 or 2.2. Note that Apache httpd 2.2 is officially End Of Life, and no new development or patches are being issued for it.
- Obtain the Apache HTTP server from the location listed above, and unpack it:
cd httpd-2_x_NN ./configure --enable-so make make install
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop
cd ../php-NN ./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-pdo-mysql make make install
cp php.ini-development /usr/local/lib/php.ini
LoadModule php_module modules/libphp.so
LoadModule php7_module modules/libphp7.so
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
Or, if we wanted to allow .php, .php2, .php3, .php4, .php5, .php6, and .phtml files to be executed as PHP, but nothing else, we’d use this:
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
And to allow .phps files to be handled by the php source filter, and displayed as syntax-highlighted source code, use this:
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
mod_rewrite may be used To allow any arbitrary .php file to be displayed as syntax-highlighted source code, without having to rename or copy it to a .phps file:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule (.*\.php)s$ $1 [H=application/x-httpd-php-source]
/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
Following the steps above you will have a running Apache2 web server with support for PHP as a SAPI module. Of course there are many more configuration options available Apache and PHP. For more information type ./configure —help in the corresponding source tree.
Apache may be built multithreaded by selecting the worker MPM, rather than the standard prefork MPM, when Apache is built. This is done by adding the following option to the argument passed to ./configure, in step 3 above:
This should not be undertaken without being aware of the consequences of this decision, and having at least a fair understanding of the implications. The Apache documentation regarding » MPM-Modules discusses MPMs in a great deal more detail.
Note:
The Apache MultiViews FAQ discusses using multiviews with PHP.
Note:
To build a multithreaded version of Apache, the target system must support threads. In this case, PHP should also be built with Zend Thread Safety (ZTS). Under this configuration, not all extensions will be available. The recommended setup is to build Apache with the default prefork MPM-Module.
User Contributed Notes 16 notes
I had just installed php8.1.12 on a machine used for writing C code.
Below are some libraries that I needed to download on a debian-based OS.
apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
apt-get install apache2-dev
apt-get install libxml2-dev
apt-get install libsqlite3-dev
These were the missing packages that I required.
If you get an error regarding a missing package or library, for example when I needed sqlite3, run the command:
And you’ll be able to see if there’s any dev or lib packages.
The apache2 instructions worked flawlessly at the time of php8.1.12; and in order to get certain requirements for an application, I had to run the php configure file like so:
./configure —with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs —with-pdo-mysql —with-mysqli —with-zip —enable-gd
The extra flags allowed me to use both types of mysql, allowed me to utilize PHP zip archiving, and allowed me to use Gnatt stuff.
When I upgrade to apache 2.2, this:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php5
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php42
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php4
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php3
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php .phtm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .phtml
AddType application/x-httpd-php .asp
. does not worked for me, so I did this:
Another interesting point with Apache 2.2 is following.
Let suppose we installed PHP as module. But for some directory, we need to use PHP as CGI (probably because of custom configuration). This can be done using:
AddType application/x-httpd-php-custom .php
Action application/x-httpd-php-custom /cgi-bin/php-huge
Note type must be different than «application/x-httpd-php» and also you need to deactivate the handler on sertain extention. You can do mixed configuration:
AddType application/x-httpd-php-custom .php
Action application/x-httpd-php-custom /cgi-bin/php-huge
in such case files like *.php5 and so on will be parsed via module, but *.php will go to php-huge executable.
Building php 7.1.3 with mysql 5.7.17 and httpd 2.4.25 on Debian 8, step 5 failed for me. Instead of
I have successfully installed Apache 2.2.11 and PHP 5.2.8 under Red Hat 9.0 on a Pentium 166 with 32 MB of RAM.
While I used RH9, the worst possible case, these notes are probably good for RH-based distributions too (Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora, CentOS. )
If you want to install MySQL, it needs to be installed before PHP because PHP requires some libraries be available.
One think important when picking up a binary distribution of MySQL is to download all four packages: MySQL-server, MySQL-devel, MySQL-client and MySQL-shared. Note: The MySQL was bundled with PHP 4 but is not anymore in PHP 5.
Then you need to install Apache before PHP, because again PHP needs some libraries be available. I installed Apache 2 from source, using the very last version available, which is 2.2.11.
I installed PHP 5.2.8 from source. Here, I had a number of problems, but none which I could not resolve easily, some of them with a little help from different forums I found through Google.
Rembember: When it says you need a package named xyz and you notice there is also one named xyz-devel, grab it.
Most of the packages I got from:
http://legacy.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/
A similar page exists for other versions of Red Hat
and:
http://rpmfind.net/
This site has an updated version of some of the packages. Make sure to use only the one labeled for you version (in my case, Red Hat 9.0) or it will not likely work.
You already have glibc and glibc-common installed, but you need to get glibc-devel and glibc-kernheaders. Make sure to match glibc’s version (rpm -q glibc). Note: When it says kernel-header is a required dependency, that’s glibc-kernheader (not kernel-source). You will also need binutils (no need to match the version), and gcc and cpp (version must match).
You need zlib-devel (zlib is probably already installed, match the version you have).
If you install the GD extension, the actual library is already bundled with PHP 5 (use that one, they have done some changes in there, so don’t upgrade), but you will need to install libpng and libpng-devel (match version, or disable in configure if you don’t want) and libjpeg (no -devel with that one).
You will also need libxml2. Now there were a problem, because PHP requires libxml2 be 2.6 or greater, but Red Hat only supplied 2.5.4-1 for RH9 (if you have a more recent distro, you might be more lucky). After looking for a while, I decided to grab the source code for the most recent distribution at the official website (http://xmlsoft.org/) and compiled.
Hope my post is useful to someone. Please, share your experience when compiling/installing for your particular platform and setup. Remember how hard it’s been for you the very first time. I confess, my very first server installation took me nearly a week and I was glad others helped me.