Configure a CentOS 6.4 Web Server on Rackspace - Part 2: Installing Packages
We'll need to install the various pieces of software. The easiest way to do that is with the yum package manager. After entering each yum command you will be asked to confirm the installation by typing the y key and pressing enter.
First, let's update the OS and any preinstalled packages. Notice we now have to use the sudo command to run system admin tasks. You will be prompted for your password when using sudo.
$ sudo yum -y update
Next, I'm going to add the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 (EPEL) repository. This is not required, but EPEL has additional packages that I want (e.g. Fail2Ban, phpMyAdmin).
$ curl -L https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm > epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
$ sudo yum -y install epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
$ rm -f epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Next let's install a collection of useful developer tools. This includes things like git, subversion, make, and the gcc complier. Most people won't use all of these tools, so you could also install tools individually if you want to be more selective. But we'll take the easy way in this tutorial.
$ sudo yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'
You may want to install debugging tools like gdb and valgrind as well. If you're only going to use PHP on the server side you can skip this step.
$ sudo yum -y groupinstall 'Debugging Tools'
Now let's install the Apache web server:
$ sudo yum -y install httpd mod_ssl
You'll probably want PHP, so let's install PHP along with a set of common PHP extensions:
$ sudo yum -y install php php-common
And let's install a few additional useful PHP extensions, including MySQL support, Pear, and mcrypt:
$ sudo yum -y install php-mysql php-pear php-devel php-gd php-pecl-memcache php-pspell php-snmp php-xmlrpc php-xml php-mbstring.x86_64
Finally, we'll add MySQL to complete our LAMP stack:
$ sudo yum -y install mysql mysql-server
Okay, one last thing. We'll need to manage iptables (the CentOS firewall). To make that easier let's install a GUI:
$ sudo yum -y install system-config-firewall-tui system-config-firewall
That's it for software. In the next section we'll get our web server up and running.
Next > Part 3: Starting the Web Server
