Apache is the widely used web server, and PHP is a dominant technology when it comes to CMS frameworks i.e. WordPress, Drupal, etc. For this reason the deployment of the stack has been made effortless with XAMPP PHP development environment. XAMPP is an acronym, where X stands for any operating system (WAMP for Windows, LAMP for Linux), A for Apache web server, M for MySQL or MariaDB database engine, and PP stands for PHP and Perl. The post is about setting-up PHP development environment XAMPP on Ubuntu 16.04, suing terminal.
Step 0 – Login and update
First of all login into your Ubuntu machine using SSH – for a regular it’s recommended to add your SSH public key.
ssh <username>@<hostname/IP>
Optional – a recommended step for setup on a fresh machine.
sudo apt-update
sudo apt-upgrade
sudo apt-upgrade
Step 1 – download XAMPP
Download the XAMPP from the official download page. You can choose from the available versions 7.2.2 is the latest with PHP 7.
For PHP 7
The stack includes – Apache 2.4.29, MariaDB 10.1.30, PHP 7.2.2 + SQLite 2.8.17/3.7.17
wget https://www.apachefriends.org/xampp-files/7.2.2/xampp-linux-x64-7.2.2-0-installer.run
For PHP 5
The stack includes – Apache 2.4.29, MariaDB 10.1.30, PHP 5.6.33 & PEAR + SQLite 2.8.17/3.7.17
wget https://www.apachefriends.org/xampp-files/5.6.33/xampp-linux-x64-5.6.33-0-installer.run
Step 2 – Executeable permission
Do execute the downloaded installer, we need to set executable permissions on it.
chmod +x xampp-linux-x64-5.6.33-0-installer.run
Step 3 – Install XAMPP
For PHP 7
./xampp-linux-x64-7.2.2-0-installer.run
For PHP 5
./xampp-linux-x64-5.6.33-0-installer.run
Step 4 – Start XAMPP
To start all the service (packaged inside XAMPP)
sudo /opt/lampp/xampp start
To stop XAMPP
sudo /opt/lampp/xampp stop
Step 5 – Change service port (optional)
The location of conf can vary – for our case you can find it at /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf. Open the file using editor of your choice, find and update the ‘Listen 80’, replace 80 with port of your choice.