This is Part I of our Guru series of tutorials that will provide an insight into various aspects of running a production ready server. One of the most important but often overlooked part of development is the environment.The positive difference that a properly deployed production server can make to your business is undeniable. So this tutorial will guide you through one of our favourite and arguably fastest growing server configuration among developer community.

Tutorial updated To Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

What is a LAMP/LEMP server ?

LAMP/LEMP is the one of the most popular web application environment and rightly so, it is extremely easy to use, stable, and open source. LAMP/LEMP is acronym for

1. Linux (Operating System )
2. Apache (Web Server )
3. MySQL (Database )
4. PHP (Scripting Language )

and in the case of LEMP replace Apache with Nginx which is pronounced as Engine-X, hence the ‘E’. This is not an exact definition but an example of a LAMP stack. You can mix and match various OS’s such as Cent OS, RHEL, or Ubuntu with a server of your choice ( Apache, Nginx, Openlitespeed etc.. ). Even the default database server can be swapped with drop-in replacements like MariaDB or Percona. We use MariaDB so does Google.

Now that we know what is a LAMP stack, we can actually move on to the LAMP setup that we are going to install and deploy in this tutorial.

OS

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been chosen as the OS for the server for its ease of use, precise repositories and finally the 5 year life-cycle of support that every LTS release has from Canonical Ltd.

HTTP Server

Apache or Nginx as your HTTP server? We use Apache 2.4.6 (needs a series of articles to explain the reasons).You must choose your HTTP server based on your needs, its flexibility, stability, and performance.A recent study conducted by W3techs showed adoption rate for Nginx increased by 52% over the past year. However, Nginx is still not the default HTTP server of the web and most probably the CMS software you are using, would have been developed for an Apache environment. WordPress, Joomla, & PHPBB etc only support Apache. Your Apache .htaccess rules needs to be adopted to Nginx on your own but Nginx does offer extensive DOCS and a few converters are available to do the same.

MySQL

High performance database schemas are the in-thing now as even web giants like Google and Wikipedia are making the move away from Oracle’s MySQL. MariaDB 5.5.X is a drop-in replacement for MySQL meaning its backward compatible with MySQL databases. MariaDB offers a lot more features focuses on scaling, replication, Indexing and Memory. It also comes with extensions that you can install to increase its features. Similarly, Percona an open source project supported by Oracle has seen increasing adoption rate due to its InnoDB optimisations that are providing excellent results during benchmarks.

PHP

Most of the open source software that we use for our clients is made with PHP and most of you are probably using software made with PHP such as WordPress, Joomla or Xenforo. So, the default LAMP stack in Ubuntu installs PHP automatically in case you need Perl or Phyton, you need to install them before it can be used instead of PHP.

Let’s Start

Wow! That was long but trust me it always better to know what you are doing.

Hosting & Deploying

If you are using web hosts then most probably your host would install the OS for you. Make sure that you get a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS machine with root access.

Updating OS

Sometimes the OS will not be updated and its good to start by updating the OS and apt-get ( command-line packaging tool ). You would need a SSH Client or Terminal access to your server to use the following commands. If you are on windows you can use Putty

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Let’s break the command into digestible pieces:

• sudo lets you run programs as super user.
• apt-get refers to the command-line packaging tool.
• upgrade does exactly what you think it does, it tells apt-get to update/upgrade.

Installing LAMP

Ubuntu comes with a default LAMP setup. At the time of writing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installs PHP 5.3.X, MySQL 4.1 and Apache 2.To install this use the following command

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

Custom Stack

If you don’t want to install the default stack, following commands will guide you through customising your stack.

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5

sudo service apache2 restart

sudo apt-get install nginx

sudo service nginx start

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-oldstable

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-curl php5-cli php5-cgi php5-pear php5-imagick php5-gd php5-fpm php5-pdo php5-mcrypt

apt-cache search php5-

sudo apt-get install mysql-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql mysql-client

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/mariadb/repo/5.5/ubuntu precise main'

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mariadb-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql mysql-client

  sudo service mysql start

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib
deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

wget http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc && sudo apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install webmin

sudo service webmin start

End of Part I

Hurray! You made it to the end of Part I of our series on setting up a LAMP/LEMP server. I know, this is a really big article but the good news is you have a working LAMP/LEMP setup at the end of it. By no means this is a production ready server, we still have to configure and secure our server. Stay tuned as we dwell deeper into server setup in subsequent parts of this series.

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