Installing and Configuring PHP

Introduction

Client-side programming languages, like JavaScript, are handled by the browser. Major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, etc. all include JavaScript engines that use just-in-time compilers to execute JavaScript code (Mozilla has a nice description of the process.) From an end user's perspective, you basically install JavaScript when you install a web browser.

PHP, on the other hand, is a server-side programming language, which means it must be installed on the server in order to be used. From a system or web administrator's perspective, this means that not only does PHP have be installed on a server, but it must also be configured to work with the HTTP server, which in our case is Apache2.

The main use of PHP is to interact with databases, like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc., in order to create data-based page content. To begin to set this up, we have to:

1. Install PHP and relevant Apache2 modules
2. Configure PHP and relevant modules to work with Apache2
3. Configure PHP and relevant modules to work with MySQL

Install PHP

As usual, we will use apt install to install PHP and relevant modules. Then we will restart Apache2 using the systemctl command. Use apt show [package_name] to read more about each package we will install. The first command below installs the php and the libapache2-mod-php packages. The latter package is used to create a connection between PHP and Apache2.

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php
sudo systemctl restart apache2

We can check its status and see if there are any errors:

systemctl status apache2

Check Install

To check that it's been installed and that it's working with Apache2, we can create a small PHP file in our web document root. To do that, we cd to the /var/www/html/ directory and create a file called info.php:

cd /var/www/html/
sudo nano info.php

In that file, add the following text, then save and close the file:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

No visit that file using the external IP address for your server. For example, in Firefox, Chrome, etc, go to:

http://55.333.55.333/info.php

Again, be sure to replace the IP below with the IP address of your server and be sure to use http and not https.

You should see a page that provides system information about PHP, Apache2, and the server. The top of the page should look like Figure 1 below:

Basic Configurations

By default, when Apache2 serves a web page, it looks for and serves a file titled index.html, even if it does not display that file in the URL bar. Thus, http://example.com/ actually resolves to http://example.com/index.html in such cases.

However, if our plan is to provide for PHP, we want Apache2 to default to a file titled index.php instead of index.html file. To configure that, we need to edit the dir.conf file in the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ directory. In that file there is a line that starts with DirectoryIndex. The first file in that line is index.html, and then there are a series of other files that Apache2 will look for in the order listed. If any of those files exist in the document root, then Apache2 will serve those before proceeding to the next. We simply want to put index.php first and let index.html be second on that line. Before modifying this file, it's good practice to create a backup of the original. So we will use the cp command to create a copy with a new name, and then we will use nano to edit the file.

cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
sudo cp dir.conf dir.conf.bak
sudo nano dir.conf

Next we change the line to this:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm

Whenever we make a configuration change, we can use the apachectl command to check our configuration:

apachectl configtest

If we get a Syntax Ok message, we can reload the Apache2 configuration and restart the service:

sudo systemctl reload apache2
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Create an index.php File

Now create a basic PHP page. cd back to the Apache2 document root directory and use nano to create and open an index.php file:

cd /var/www/html/
sudo nano index.php

Let's add some HTML and PHP to it. We will add PHP that functions as a simple browser detector. Add the following code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Broswer Detector</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>You are using the following browser to view this site:</p>

<?php
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

if(strpos($user_agent, 'Edge') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = 'Microsoft Edge';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Firefox') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = 'Mozilla Firefox';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Chrome') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = 'Google Chrome';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Opera Mini') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = "Opera Mini";
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Opera') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = 'Opera';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Safari') !== FALSE) {
    $browser = 'Safari';
} else {
    $browser = 'Unknown';
}

if(strpos($user_agent, 'Windows') !== FALSE) {
    $os = 'Windows';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Linux') !== FALSE) {
    $os = 'Linux';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Mac') !== FALSE) {
    $os = 'Mac';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'iOS') !== FALSE) {
    $os = 'iOS';
} elseif(strpos($user_agent, 'Android') !== FALSE) {
    $os = 'Android';
} else {
    $os = 'Unknown';
}

if($browser === 'Unknown' || $os === 'Unknown') {
    echo 'No browser detected.';
} else {
    echo 'Your browser is ' . $browser . ' and your operating system is ' . $os . '.';
}
?>

</body>
</html>

Next, save the file and exit nano. In your browser, visit your external IP address site (again, replace your server's IP address):

http://55.333.55.333/

Although your index.html file still exists in your document root, Apache2 now returns the index.php file instead. However, if for some reason the index.php was deleted, then Apache2 would revert to the index.html file since that's what is listed next in the dir.conf DirectoryIndex line.

Conclusion

In this section, we installed PHP and configured it work with Apache2. We also created a simple PHP test page that reported our browser user agent information on our website.

In the next section, we'll learn how to complete the LAMP stack by adding the MySQL relational database to our setup.