LD Software - phpNuke How To

3.6.4. Apache, PHP and MySQL on Mandrake Linux

We will describe how to get a functioning, local installation of the Apache-PHP-MySQL trio on a Linux system - we chose Mandrake Linux for this purpose, but the process is similar with other distributions. We will use visual tools for our purposes, making the assumption that, whoever is capable of compiling the binaries from the source code himself, will not need our guidance.

Figure 3-20. RPMdrake: selecting the Apache package(s) for installation.

RPMdrake: selecting the Apache package(s) for installation.

The most simple thing to do to get Apache, PHP and MySQL installed under Linux, is to install the appropriate packages from the CD. For this, we will use the software application tool called RPMdrake; upon execution, it will ask for the root password; after we enter it, we will be presented a screen that asks us what we want to install. We enter "Apache" in the aproppriate field and in the sequence we choose the main Apache package (Figure 3-20). RPMdrake will ask us if we also want to install the packages of the "dependencies" (i.e. packages which the main package we selected depends on). It is important to answer with "yes" here.

We then click on "install" and we are asked to insert the CD (or the CDs) containing the RPM packages. Once Apache has been installed, we open the Mandrake Control Center and click on "Start" for the httpd service (Figure 3-21).

Figure 3-21. Mandrake Control Center.

Mandrake Control Center.

The last control step is to open our browser and instruct it to open http://localhost/. If the browser's response is Apache's Welcome Page, we are done.

We have to repeat the above operations in the same identical way for the PHP and MySQL packages. In order to make the MySQL database service available, we have again to go to Mandrake Control Center and click on "Start" for the mysql service - PHP does not need this step, it is available immediately after installation.

But where is the folder for the HTML files and our PHP-Nuke? It turns out that this is under /var/www/html and we should use phpMyAdmin (Section 3.3) to give this folder the permissions of 777 (for more on file permissions, see Section 3.2.3). This way all users will be able to add, modify and delete files there, not only root.

To verify that everything has gone well, we use the info.php file of Section 3.6.1.1. If we get a screen similar to that of Figure 3-19, then everything is fine.