Installing LAMP & phpMyAdmin
Installing LAMP on your computer can be
incredibly easy or kinda hard. It just depends if you are a glutton for
punishment or not. Fortunately, most of us like to do things that are
both quick and efficient and I am no different. So the method I will
use to install LAMP is going to be the painless one.
Start by opening a terminal. I like to use
the [CTRL][ALT][T] key stroke to do this. Once the terminal opens type
in the command sudo apt-get install lamp-server^. Please note the caret (^) at the end of the command. It is required.
At this point you will be prompted to download the packages required by your request. Enter y, and press enter.
When the packages are downloaded and the
installation starts you will be asked for a MySQL root user password,
and then asked to type it again. This is the password for the root
account of the MySQL server program. This password is very important
and must be remembered. If you have to write it down to keep from
forgetting it, remember to keep it in a safe place.
When the software installation has completed we can test that everything is good to go by opening up the web browser and typing http://localhost into the address bar.
[Additional Information]
For those of you who have installed
programs on Ubuntu using the terminal may be asking what is the deal
with the caret (^) at the end of the command. Well, what you are seeing
here is a clever little shortcut to install all the packages we need in
one fell swoop. The lamp-server^ allows the apt-get program to perform
a task that the program Tasksel would do. Tasksel is the program that
the installer of Ubuntu Server runs to allow you to select bundles of
server software. This allows us to do the same thing without having to
separately install the Tasksel program.
Installing phpMyAdmin
The program phpMyAdmin is a web application
that will allow you to work with the MySQL server from a web based
interface. It is convenient to have installed if your a developer and
allows you to create databases, do queries, create users and a myriad of
other handy things. Although this is not specifically required to
develop Joomla! 2.5 extensions, its inclusion does make life just a
little bit better.
To install phpmyadmin, enter the command sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin in your terminal. Apt-get will notify you of the packages that need installed and ask you if you want to continue, enter y and press enter.
Once the packages are downloaded and the
install starts, it will ask you to choose the web server that should be
automatically configured to run phpMyAdmin. Press the space bar to
select apache2, then press the tab key until <Ok> is highlighted
and press the enter key.
Next, phpMyadmin informs you that a
database needs to be installed and configured before it can be used. It
asks if you want to allow it to create this database using the script
dbconfig-common. Select yes and press the enter key.
Next, phpMyAdmin asks you for the database
administrator user's password. This is the root password we created for
MySQL in step 1. Enter that password in this box and press tab to
highlight<Ok> and press the enter key.
Next, phpMyAdmin asks for a password that
will be used to communicate with the database server. Again, you can
enter anything you like here but you will want to remember it. I use
the same password that I entered for the root user in step one. Press
tab to highlight <Ok> and press the enter key. PhpMyAdmin asks you
to re-enter the password you just created. Enter the password again,
then press tab to highlight <Ok> and press the enter key.
Finally, phpMyAdmin has been installed. To test our work, open your browser up and enter http://localhost/phpmyadmin
in the address bar and press enter. If all worked well, you will be
presented with the phpMyAdmin login screen. Enter the user name of root
and the password you created in step 1 above. You should now be logged
into phpMyAdmin. All is good.
