Install a Web Server on Raspberry Pi: Apache + PHP + MySQL

This is a typical question you might ask in various projects on Raspberry Pi.
As I’m also a web developer, I make many web projects and I’m used to this, but I understand it can be overwhelming for some of you.
No worry, you’ll know everything at the end of this post 🙂

To install a full web server on Raspberry Pi (LAMP), three packages are required: Apache, PHP and MySQL.
Apache answer HTTP requests, PHP generate dynamic content and MySQL store and read information in a database.

In this post, I’ll show you how to install and configure them to work together.
I’ll also explain some extra tips depending on what you really need to do.

By the way, if you are really interested in improving your skills on Raspberry Pi, I highly recommend to check out my e-book here. It’s a 30-days challenge from beginner to master, with step-by-step tutorials and many projects to practice along the way.

How does it work?

Before going deeper about the installation steps, I want to be sure that everyone understand what we are doing and how a web server works.

Apache

The main goal for the Apache service is to answer requests on HTTP and HTTPS ports of your Raspberry Pi.
HTTP and HTTPS are the main protocols on the Internet for web surfing
It works because Apache is here to respond to your browser requests on ports 80 and 443.

Apache receives a request on http://<RASPBERRYPI_IP> and has to display something, depending on your Apache configuration.
Typically, it’s an HTML page for your website or the app you’re using on the Raspberry Pi.
HTML is a language served by Apache and readable by your web browser to display web pages.

PHP

PHP is here to bring dynamic content to your web pages.
HTML is a static page language you can supercharge with PHP code to make your page look different depending on external conditions (visitor language, visitor history, time of the day, etc …).

Here’s what happens when a visitor sees your page:

• PHP compiles the PHP code in your page (via an Apache module)
• PHP generates a specific HTML code
• Apache always display static HTML code, but this time PHP generated it before

I’ll show you examples later in this post to better understand this part.

MySQL

MySQL is a way to manage a database on your web server, to store any data you need to keep on your site.
For example, on RaspberryTips, there is a database with all the posts, all the images links, all the comments, etc …

MySQL includes three parts:

• A server, to store data in files and answer requests
• A client, to connect the server locally or remotely
• A specific language (SQL), to grab the needed data precisely (from PHP for example)

How to install web server components?

At this point, you should understand what is each component (Apache, PHP and MySQL), and if you need it or not.
Maybe you want to create a basic and static web server, then Apache will be enough.
Or if you want dynamic pages but you don’t need to save data on the server, Apache and PHP will be enough.

I’ll let you make your choice and skip the unnecessary parts in the following procedures.
Before starting you need two prerequisites:

• Install Raspberry Pi OS on your Raspberry Pi if not done already
• Update your Raspberry Pi OS system to get the last version of each component:
  sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Install Apache

The first step is to install Apache on your Raspberry Pi.
To do this use apt like this:
sudo apt install apache2

Then we’ll check if Apache is working:

• Find your Raspberry Pi IP address
• Open your web browser and go to http://<RASPBERRY IP>
  For example, http://192.168.1.18
• Check that a page like this appear
  

As you can see in this page, web pages are located under /var/www/html on the Raspberry Pi.
You can edit index.html to change this page or add new pages in the same folder.

You can also remove this page and just upload the files you want to share in this folder.
For example, if you want to share files on your network, just remove the index.html and put your files in /var/www/html, Apache will automatically generate a web page with links to each one

Install PHP

Then we need to install PHP to add dynamic content capabilities to our web server.

Installation

To install PHP we need to add two packages:
sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php

The first one adds the core package for PHP and the possibility to run PHP scripts in the terminal.
The second allows us to add PHP code in web pages.

First PHP page

We’ll check if everything is fine with our installation before going further.

Follow these steps to create a PHP file and test it in your browser:

• Go to the Apache web folder:
  cd /var/www/html
• Create a PHP file:
  sudo nano test.php
• Copy this code into it:
  <?php phpinfo(); ?>
  This is a basic PHP function to display PHP configuration in the browser.
• Save and Exit (CTRL+O, CTRL+X)
• Go to this URL with your web browser: http://<RASPBERRY IP>/test.php
• This should display something like this:
  

If you see this page, everything is OK, your Apache and PHP web server is ready.
Move to the next chapter if needed.

Install MySQL

The last component is MySQL, and again we need to install it with this command:
sudo apt install mariadb-server php-mysql

The second package adds the possibility to use MySQL functions in PHP code.
You need to restart Apache to add this functionality:
sudo service apache2 restart

Create your first MySQL user

MySQL stores data. Authentication is required to be sure that only allowed people can access these data.
For a quick start, we’ll create a MySQL super user to use in our PHP code later.
But you can create as many users as you want with different privileges:

• Log into the MySQL console:
  sudo mysql
• Create your first database:
  CREATE DATABASE test;
• Create the first user:
  CREATE USER 'webuser' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
  Try to use a strong password immediately, you’ll forget to change it later 🙂
• Add all privileges to our test database to this user:
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON test.* To 'webuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
• Save the changes:
  FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
• Quit the MySQL console:
  quit

Create a first table in the database

Now we have a test database and a test user, we’ll check that everything works fine by creating a first table in the database to use it later in the PHP code.

If you’re new with these database words, imagine the database as an Excel spreadsheet and a table as a tab in this spreadsheet. We’ll store data in this table.

• Go back to the MySQL console, but with the “webuser” this time:
  mysql -uwebuser -ppassword test
• Create a basic table:
  CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test ( line_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT, data VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (line_id) );
  Obviously, this is a basic useless table, if you want to use anything else you can.
  Press ENTER after pasting the request.
• Insert one line in this new table:
  INSERT INTO test (data) VALUES ("This is a test string in my database");
  We add a first line in your table, with “test” in the data field.
  Yes, I’m very creative with this 🙂
• Exit:
  quit

Now we’re ready to move to the PHP code.
We have all we need (database, table and user).

First PHP script to connect to MySQL

After all these preparation steps we can now check if PHP can speak with MySQL:

• Go to the Apache folder:
  cd /var/www/html
• Create a new PHP file:
  sudo nano test-mysql.php
• Paste these lines into it:
  <?php
$link = mysqli_connect("127.0.0.1", "webuser", "password", "test");
if($link) {
$query = mysqli_query($link, "SELECT * FROM test");
while($array = mysqli_fetch_array($query)) {
echo $array['data']."<br />";
} }
else {
echo "MySQL error :".mysqli_error();
}
?>
  You may need to edit the first line to fit your first user login and password.
• Save and Exit (CTRL+O, CTRL+W)
• Switch to your web browser and check the URL: http://<RASPBERRY IP>/test-mysql.php
  This should display the content of your database table.

Here we are, you know how to install a basic web server and create a first page to connect to MySQL and display something from your database.
Feel free to adapt the database and the PHP code to fit your needs.

Extra tips

I’ll give you here two tips to improve your web server or to make it easier to manage.

PHPMyAdmin

Previously in this post, we made all the changes in the MySQL database manually, doing requests to create users, grant access or insert data.
But there is a popular tool to do this faster and intuitively: PHPMyAdmin.
It’s a free tool, providing a web interface to manage your MySQL server.

To install PHPMyAdmin, follow these steps:

• Install the package with apt:
  sudo apt install phpmyadmin
• During the installation process, select these options:
  • Select Apache2 (press space and enter)
  • Configure the database for PHPMyAdmin with db-common: No
• After the installation, go to http://<RASPBERRY IP>/phpmyadmin
• Log in with the user created before
• You’ll find our database in the menu, with the table inside and the data on the right
  Something like this:
  
• You’ll also find intuitive menu to do everything within your database

Virtual Hosts

If you want to host several websites or apps in your Raspberry Pi, you have two choices:

• Use one folder for each app, like http://192.168.1.1/app1 and http://192.168.1.1/app2
• Use virtual hosts to have an address like http://app1.domain.com and http://app2.domain.com

For the first option, just create as many folders as your need in /var/www/html
For the second one, you need to:

• Add sub-domains in your DNS server or in your hosts file
• Create virtual hosts in the apache configuration, one for each sub-domain

You can make this configuration in the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ folder
You’ll find all the help you need on this page for example

Conclusion

I hope this article will help you to install a basic web server on your Raspberry Pi.
I think this is rather a beginner how-to guide, and I could write a lot more on this topic.
If you are interested, I’ll create other posts on Apache/PHP/MySQL to help you master these main services on Linux.