How to Install Lighttpd with PHP, MariaDB and PhpMyAdmin in Ubuntu

Lighttpd is an open-source web server for Linux machines, very fast and very small in size, it doesn’t require a lot of memory and CPU usage which makes it one of the best servers for any project that needs speed in deploying web pages.

Lighttpd Features

1. Support for FastCGI, SCGI, CGI interfaces.
2. Support for using chroot.
3. Support for mod_rewrite.
4. Support for TLS/SSL using OpenSSL.
5. A Very small size: 1MB.
6. Low CPU and RAM usage.
7. Licensed under the BSD license.

This article explains how to install Lighttpd, MariaDB, PHP with PhpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04.

Step 1: Installing Lighttpd on Ubuntu

Fortunately, Lighttpd is available to install from the official Ubuntu repositories, So if you want to install Lighttpd, you only have to run the following command.

$ sudo apt install lighttpd

Once, Lighttpd installed, you can go to your website or IP address and you will see this page which confirms the installation of Lighttpd on your machine.

Before, heading up for further installation, I would like to tell you that the following are the important things about Lighttpd you should know before continuing.

1. /var/www/html – is the default root folder for Lighttpd.
2. /etc/lighttpd/ – is the default folder for Lighttpd configuration files.

Step 2: Installing PHP on Ubuntu

Lighttpd web server won’t be usable without PHP FastCGI support. Additionally, you also need to install the ‘php-mysql‘ package to enable MySQL support.

# sudo apt install php php-cgi php-mysql

Now to enable the PHP module, run the following commands in the terminal.

$ sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi 
$ sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php

After enabling modules, reload the Lighttpd server configuration by running the below command.

$ sudo service lighttpd force-reload

Now to test if PHP is working or not, let’s create a ‘test.php‘ file in /var/www/test.php.

$ sudo vi /var/www/html/test.php

Press the “i” button to start editing, and add the following line to it.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Press ESC key, and write:x and press Enter key to save the file.

Now go to your domain or IP address and call test.php file, like http://127.0.0.1/test.php. You will see this page which means that PHP is installed successfully.

Step 3: Installing MariaDB in Ubuntu

MariaDB is a fork from MySQL, it is also a good database server to use with Lighttpd, to install it on Ubuntu 20.04 run these series of commands in the terminal.

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys 'https://mariadb.org/mariadb_release_signing_key.asc'
$ sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64,arm64,ppc64el] http://mirrors.piconets.webwerks.in/mariadb-mirror/repo/10.5/ubuntu focal main'
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install mariadb-server

Once installed, you can run the security script to secure the MariaDB installation as shown.

$ sudo mysql_secure_installation

The script will be prompted to enter the root password or set it up. Thereafter, answer Y for every subsequent prompt.

Installing PhpMyAdmin in Ubuntu

PhpMyAdmin is a powerful web interface to manage databases online, almost every system admin use it because it is very easy to manage databases using it. To install it on Ubuntu 20.04, run the below command.

$ sudo apt install phpmyadmin

During installation, it will show you the below dialog, choose NO.

Now choose ‘Lighttpd‘.

We are almost done here, just run this simple command to create a symlink in /var/www/ to the PHPMyAdmin folder in /usr/share/.

$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www

Now go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and it will ask you to enter the root password, that you’ve set above during MariaDB installation.

That’s it, all of your server components are up and running now, You can start deploying your web projects.