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Setup Apache, MySQL, PHP and PHPMyAdmin

by Praneeth Peiris

There are a lots of complications when trying to install AMP stack on Arch Linux. I tried many things and this is what worked for me. Hope it will help you too.

Apache

To install Apache web server you can use pacman as following.

$ sudo pacman -S apache

Then it will be installed and now you have to configure the server. All the configurations are stored in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and use your favorite editor to edit it. (in my case, it’s nano)

$ sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Now we will peek into few important settings.

Port

Listen 80

This is the port where HTTP daemon runs. You can change it if you want, but 80 is the default HTTP port.

Comment the “unique_id_module”

You can use CTRL+w to find it in nano. Then that line will be as following.

#LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so

ServerAdmin

This is optional, you can change the server admin email address, so it will be displayed on server error messages.

ServerAdmin gnomez.grave@gmail.com

Restart HTTPD

You can use systemctl to deal with httpd. Remember to restart the httpd whenever you’ve done any change to any apache related configuration.

$ sudo systemctl restart httpd

If it gives you a warning like
httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
you should edit /etc/hosts and insert localhost as an entry.

For that, use $ sudo nano /etc/hosts and add localhost to the entry with 127.0.0.1. Then it will look like this.

127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain   localhost       arch

Now your Apache server is ready to go. Your public_html folder is located in /srv/http by default.

Now lets test the server. Create index.html file inside and type a simple HTML code. (For now, you need admin privileges to write to /srv/http. We will see how to fix that later on.)

$ sudo nano /srv/http/index.html
<html>
  <head><title>Apache Home</title></head>
  <body><h1>Apache Server is working..!!</h1></body>
</html>

Then open your web browser and type localhost and press enter. Your browser should show “Apache Server is working..!!”.

Change the default Document Root

The default doc root is /srv/http. If you want to change it to something like /home/praneeth/www, here is the way.

Open httpd.conf file and edit the following.

DocumentRoot "/home/praneeth/WWW"

and

<Directory "/home/praneeth/WWW">

to the same directory you specified above. But now if you tried to access localhost after restarting httpd, you may get an "Access forbidden Error 403 localhost" error. That’s because http user don’t have permission to read the directory you specified.

There are few ways to fix this, but I’m mentioning the way worked for me.

To fix this, http user MUST be given the permission to your specified folder. So you simply can add http user to the user group, where the owner of your home directory belongs. (in my case it’s users)

$ sudo gpasswd -a http users

But now, every user in the above user group have the access to that folder. So you can do something like this.

$ sudo chmod g+xr-w /home/praneeth
$ sudo chmod -R g+xr-w /home/praneeth/www

Baaamm..!! Now you are ready to go. Restart the httpd and refresh your web browser.

PHP

To install php and other needed libraries, you can use following command.

$ sudo pacman -S php php-apache php-gd php-mcrypt

It will install PHP, but still you have to enable it in httpd.conf. Open httpd.conf and add these lines to the bottom of it.

# Use for PHP 5.x:
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
AddHandler php5-script php
Include conf/extra/php5_module.conf

(Don’t forget to restart httpd)

Now you are done with PHP. Now test it by creating a .php file (ex: info.php) in your doc root and type these lines in it.

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Save it and type localhost/info.php and you should get the PHP Info page.

MySQL

You can install MySQL by following command. (Now MySQL distribution for Arch Linux is known as MariaDB)

$ sudo pacman -S mysql

Then it will install MySQL and you can run the MySQL server by using systemctl.

$ sudo systemctl start mysqld

Then you can configure the MySQL server by following command.

$ sudo mysql_secure_installation

Then you can change the configurations. (It’s better if you enter a password for the MySQL server.)

Now you have to enable MySQL to communicate with PHP. For that you have to edit php.ini and enable mysql.

$ sudo nano /etc/php/php.ini

Remove the semi-colon (;) before the expected extensions to be enabled.

extension=mysqli.so
extension=mysql.so

Now you are ready to go with Apache-MySQL-PHP.

PHPMyAdmin

PHPMyAdmin is a GUI to manage you MySQL databases. You can install it by as following.

$ sudo pacman -S phpmyadmin

You have to install php-mcrypt if you don’t have it.

Now you need following command to get a sample config file for PHPMyAdmin.

$ sudo cp /etc/webapps/phpmyadmin/apache.example.conf /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf

And add these lines to httpd.conf

# phpMyAdmin configuration
Include conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf

If you want to allow access from any host, edit /etc/webapps/phpmyadmin/.htaccess and change

deny from all

to

allow from all

And make sure /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-phpmyadmin.conf has following information.

Alias /phpmyadmin "/usr/share/webapps/phpMyAdmin"
<Directory "/usr/share/webapps/phpMyAdmin">
    AllowOverride All
    Options FollowSymlinks
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    php_admin_value open_basedir "/srv/:/tmp/:/usr/share/webapps/:/etc/webapps:/usr/share/pear/"
</Directory>

Go to your web browser and enter localhost/phpmyadmin and you should get it working.

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