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Installing a Full LAMP Stack on Ubuntu

LAMP is just Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP installed and wired together — each piece is a small, separate install, and the only genuinely fiddly part is confirming Apache is actually executing PHP rather than serving it as plain text.

Published
Jun 2, 2025
Updated
Jul 8, 2026
By
Reader Stacks Editorial

LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — is one of the most established web server stacks, and setting it up on a fresh Ubuntu server is a matter of installing four pieces separately and confirming they're correctly wired together.

Step 1: Update the system

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2: Install Apache

sudo apt install apache2 -y
sudo systemctl enable apache2
sudo systemctl start apache2

Visiting the server's IP address in a browser at this point should show Apache's default "It works!" placeholder page — a useful checkpoint confirming the web server itself is running correctly before adding the database and PHP layers.

Step 3: Install MySQL

sudo apt install mysql-server -y
sudo mysql_secure_installation

mysql_secure_installation is an interactive script that removes several insecure defaults left over from a fresh install — anonymous users, a test database accessible without authentication, and remote root login — all of which are genuinely worth removing on any server exposed to the internet.

Step 4: Install PHP and required extensions

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql -y

libapache2-mod-php is the specific package that lets Apache actually execute PHP files, rather than just serving them as plain text — installing PHP itself without this module means .php files would download as raw source code instead of running.

Step 5: Restart Apache to load the PHP module

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 6: Verify PHP is working correctly

echo "" | sudo tee /var/www/html/info.php

Visiting http://your-server-ip/info.php should display the full PHP configuration page — this confirms Apache is genuinely executing PHP, not just serving the file's raw text; the file should be deleted afterward, since phpinfo() exposes detailed server configuration that shouldn't be publicly accessible on a real server.

sudo rm /var/www/html/info.php

Configuring a virtual host for a real project

Following the Apache virtual host pattern covered elsewhere on this site, a real project needs its own virtual host file pointing DocumentRoot at the project's public directory (for a Laravel app) rather than serving directly from Apache's default /var/www/html.

Checking the status of all three services

sudo systemctl status apache2
sudo systemctl status mysql
php -v

Common issue: firewall blocking the web server

sudo ufw allow 'Apache Full'
sudo ufw status

If Apache is confirmed running but the site is still unreachable from a browser, checking whether ufw (Ubuntu's firewall) is actively blocking port 80/443 is a common and easy-to-overlook next troubleshooting step.