Linux System Administration

Installation

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You should see the word testing on the screen. Your Apache server is running with

no access restrictions, serving any files and directories that exist under /var/www.

PHP

PHP is the most popular Apache CGI module. In this chapter, we’ll use PHP 4,

which remains more popular than its eventual successor, PHP 5. Using either ver-

sion is a good way to create dynamic web pages, and the large library of PHP mod-

ules adds many useful functions. Begin by getting the PHP program and libraries:

# apt-get install php4

Now get the PHP Apache module, mod_php. This command will install mod_php

and tell Apache to let it execute files with a .php suffix:

# apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4

Create this test PHP script and save it to /var/www/info.php:

<?php

phpinfo( );

?>

Then enter the script’s URL (http://server1.centralsoft.org/info.php) in your browser.

You should see a page with tables full of PHP configuration information. This infor-

mation tells a lot about your machine that you may not want to share with the

world, so you should delete this script after testing it. If you don’t see anything, take

a look at the“Troubleshooting” section at the end of this chapter.

By the way, if you’re a newbie, you just wrote your first CGI script! (In the later sec-

tion on CGI, we’ll provide more details about how web servers run external pro-

grams and scripts.)

MySQL

If you don’t need a database, you