I’m doing this on my new host — Slice­host (more about that later.) It’s VPS, which gives you a clean install of your choice of Linux Oper­at­ing Sys­tems (they have seven or eight choices.) In this case, I’m using Cen­tOS, since it’s close to what we use at work.

Once you have the base install laid down, the first step is to login and change your root password.

passwd
user­add greg­cain
passwd greg­cain
user­mod –a –G wheel greg­cain
using visudo, change

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

to

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

With­out log­ging out of your other account, log in using your non-privileged account. Update your OS install, if it’s necessary..

sudo yum update

Now install Apache, MySQL and PHP (and dependencies.)

sudo yum install php php-mysql httpd mysqlclient10 mysql-server

Con­fig­ure the ser­vices to start at login

chk­con­fig –list [to see the ser­vices and their run levels.]

chk­con­fig –level 345 httpd on

chk­con­fig –level 345 mysqld on

Now would be a good time to reboot to make sure these ser­vice start at login.

Set a pass­word for your mysql root account…

/usr/bin/mysqladmin –u root pass­word ‘yournewpassword’

Test your PHP implementation.

vi /var/www/html/phpinfo.php

add one line
<? phpinfo(); ?>

Point your browser to

httpd://<yourIP>/phpinfo.php

Pay special attention to the MySQL stanza, listed alphabetically.

Now we have all the bits in place.