Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

 

2 Installing MySQL 5.0

First we install MySQL 5.0 like this:

yast2 -i mysql mysql-client

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --add mysql
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Now check that networking is enabled. Run

netstat -tap | grep mysql

In the output you should see something like this:

server1:~ # netstat -tap | grep mysql
tcp        0      0 *:mysql                 *:*                     LISTEN      8566/mysqld
server1:~ #

If you don't see a line like this, edit /etc/my.cnf, comment out the option skip-networking:

vi /etc/my.cnf

[...]
#skip-networking
[...]

and restart your MySQL server:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Run

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

to set a password for the user [email protected].

As you've seen in the netstat output, MySQL is not only listening on localhost, but on all interfaces, which means it can be accessed from the outside. Therefore we need to set a password for the user [email protected] as well. But there's one little problem: most likely the Host column in the mysql.user table doesn't contain server1.example.com, but server1. We will change that now, and afterwards we will set a MySQL password for the user [email protected].

Let's connect to MySQL:

mysql -u root -p

Type in the password for the MySQL root user. Then, on the MySQL shell, do this:

mysql> USE mysql;

mysql> SELECT * FROM user;

The output could look like this:

+-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+
| Host      | User | Password                                  | Select_priv | Insert_priv | Update_priv | Delete_priv | Create_priv | Drop_priv | Reload_priv | Shutdown_priv | Process_priv | File_priv | Grant_priv | References_priv | Index_priv | Alter_priv | Show_db_priv | Super_priv | Create_tmp_table_priv | Lock_tables_priv | Execute_priv | Repl_slave_priv | Repl_client_priv | Create_view_priv | Show_view_priv | Create_routine_priv | Alter_routine_priv | Create_user_priv | ssl_type | ssl_cipher | x509_issuer | x509_subject | max_questions | max_updates | max_connections | max_user_connections |
+-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+
| localhost | root | *5172022923C5A97E5A842DA249B93473314416D5 | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y         | Y           | Y             | Y            | Y         | Y          | Y               | Y          | Y          | Y            | Y          | Y                     | Y                | Y            | Y               | Y                | Y                | Y              | Y                   | Y                  | Y                |          |            |             |              |             0 |           0 |               0 |                    0 |
| server1   | root |                                           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y         | Y           | Y             | Y            | Y         | Y          | Y               | Y          | Y          | Y            | Y          | Y                     | Y                | Y            | Y               | Y                | Y                | Y              | Y                   | Y                  | Y                |          |            |             |              |             0 |           0 |               0 |                    0 |
| 127.0.0.1 | root |                                           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y           | Y         | Y           | Y             | Y            | Y         | Y          | Y               | Y          | Y          | Y            | Y          | Y                     | Y                | Y            | Y               | Y                | Y                | Y              | Y                   | Y                  | Y                |          |            |             |              |             0 |           0 |               0 |                    0 |
+-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As you see, in the second row, it reads server1 instead of server1.example.com in the Host column. Let's replace that with server1.example.com:

mysql> UPDATE user SET Host = 'server1.example.com' WHERE Host = 'server1';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; 

We can leave the MySQL shell now:

mysql> quit;

Now back on the normal shell, we can set the MySQL password for the user [email protected]:

mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

 

3 Installing Lighttpd

Lighttpd is available as an OpenSUSE package, therefore we can install it like this:

yast2 -i lighttpd

Then we create the system startup links for Lighttpd (so that Lighttpd starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start it:

chkconfig --add lighttpd
/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see that Lighttpd delivers a page (well, it's a 404 page because there's no index file in Lighttpd's document root, but at least this means that Lighttpd is working ok):

Lighttpd's default document root is /srv/www/htdocs on OpenSUSE, and the configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.

 

4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Lighttpd through FastCGI. There's a FastCGI package for PHP5 available on OpenSUSE, php5-fastcgi, which we install like this:

yast2 -i php5-fastcgi