Before you begin, you need the following:

• Linux distro (Arch Linux was used in the presentation)
• Installed packages for Apache, MySQL, and mod_php, perl, or mod_python
• The ability to accept connections initiated on port 80.
  • Fedora has it blocked in iptables.

• Know what you're doing before setting up a production server. It's very easy to set up something that is insecure.
• See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/configuring.html , the official httpd documentation for help with configuration. It includes a detailed list of directives.
• Find your httpd.conf . Arch, for instance, puts it in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
• The Listen directive can be used to set a nonstandard port, or to only listen to requests on a particular IP address.
• Include allows other .conf files to be imported, usually for module configuration.
• LoadModule [mod_name] [mod_path] includes a module, like mod_php, mod_python, etc.
  • mod_userdir allows per-user web space at /~username/ .
• Directory allows configuring per-directory behavior, such as setting custom handlers (like using a specially-compiled php-cgi ).

• Start by getting the PHP source from http://www.php.net
• Unpack the tarball and cd to the directoy it contains. From there, you can run ./configure --help | less to get a list of compile options.
  • Generally, you want to recompile PHP because it needs an obscure --with- X that your distro didn't ship with, or you need a different version. Don't forget --with-mysql if you plan to be using a MySQL database.
• Run make . The Apache module is in sapi/apache/ . The cgi version is in sapi/cgi/ .

This should only ever be done on a server on which you can't install your own mod_php. Since a new process must be spawned for every request, php-cgi is very slow, especially under load.

• Copy sapi/cgi/php-cgi to your cgi-bin directory.
• Add the following to the .htaccess file in the directory you want to use the custom PHP,

  AddHandler phpFive .php
  Action phpFive [web path to php-cgi]

  replacing [web path to php-cgi] with the path on your server to where the php-cgi executable is located.

• Acts on its directory and all subdirectories.
• AddHandler mentioned in previous section.
• To set a custom error document, ErrorDocument 404 [file] , where [file] is the HTTP path (absolute or relative) to your error doc.

No one is this excited over PHP or Perl.

• Example- creating a database (new_db.sql):

  CREATE DATABASE lamp_test;
  USE lamp_test;
  CREATE TABLE birds (
  name VARCHAR(80),
  color VARCHAR(20),
  birthday DATE,
  wingspan INT
  );
  

• Allowing non-root user to access this database: GRANT ALL ON lamp_test.* TO "lamp" IDENTIFIED BY "password";
• There are many other permissions that can be tinkered with-- all of which are in the "user" table-- to take a look at what users exist and a few of their permissions on a few databases:

  USE mysql;
  SELECT host, user FROM user;
  SELECT
  host, user, select_priv, insert_priv, delete_priv
  FROM db WHERE db="lamp_test";
  SHOW FIELDS FROM db;
  

  Altering the fields of this table will change configuration.
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/ for the documentation.

• Go to http://www.phpmyadmin.net and download phpmyadmin tarball into an htdoc subdirectory.
• Point browser to that directory to see databases through Web interface. You will be brought to a configuration page.
• Use the user you just created to access your new database.