Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 11.10 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.
I'm running all the steps in this tutorial with root privileges, so make sure you're logged in as root:

sudo su

2 Installing MySQL 5

First we install MySQL 5 like this:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

You will be asked to provide a password for the MySQL root user - this password is valid for the user root@localhost as well as root@server1.example.com, so we don't have to specify a MySQL root password manually later on:
New password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Repeat password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Lighttpd

Lighttpd is available as an Ubuntu package, therefore we can install it like this:

apt-get install lighttpd

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100/index.lighttpd.html, and you should see the Lighttpd placeholder page:

Lighttpd's default document root is /var/www on Ubuntu, and the configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. Additional configurations are stored in files in the /etc/lighttpd/conf-available directory - these configurations can be enabled with the lighttpd-enable-mod command which creates a symlink from the /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled directory to the appropriate configuration file in /etc/lighttpd/conf-available. You can disable configurations with the lighttpd-disable-mod command.

4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Lighttpd through FastCGI. Fortunately, Ubuntu provides a FastCGI-enabled PHP5 package which we install like this:

apt-get install php5-cgi

5 Configuring Lighttpd And PHP5

To enable PHP5 in Lighttpd, we must modify /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1:

vi /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

[...] ; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI. PHP's ; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not grok ; what PATH_INFO is. For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs. Setting ; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the spec. A setting ; of zero causes PHP to behave as before. Default is 1. You should fix your scripts ; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED. ; http://php.net/cgi.fix-pathinfo cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 [...]

To enable the fastcgi configuration, run the following commands:

lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi
lighttpd-enable-mod fastcgi-php

This creates the symlinks /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/10-fastcgi.conf which points to /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf and /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled/15-fastcgi-php.conf which points to /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf:

ls -l /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled

root@server1:~# ls -l /etc/lighttpd/conf-enabled
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 2011-11-07 18:37 10-fastcgi.conf -> ../conf-available/10-fastcgi.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 2011-11-07 18:37 15-fastcgi-php.conf -> ../conf-available/15-fastcgi-php.conf
root@server1:~#

Then we reload Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

6 Testing PHP5 / Getting Details About Your PHP5 Installation

The document root of the default web site is /var/www. We will now create a small PHP file (info.php) in that directory and call it in a browser. The file will display lots of useful details about our PHP installation, such as the installed PHP version.

vi /var/www/info.php

Now we call that file in a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100/info.php):

As you see, PHP5 is working, and it's working through FastCGI, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5. MySQL is not listed there which means we don't have MySQL support in PHP5 yet.

7 Getting MySQL Support In PHP5

To get MySQL support in PHP, we can install the php5-mysql package. It's a good idea to install some other PHP5 modules as well as you might need them for your applications. You can search for available PHP5 modules like this:

apt-cache search php5

Pick the ones you need and install them like this:

apt-get install php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-intl php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

Now restart Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Now reload http://192.168.0.100/info.php in your browser and scroll down to the modules section again. You should now find lots of new modules there, including the MySQL module:

8 Links

• Lighttpd: http://www.lighttpd.net/
• PHP: http://www.php.net/
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/