This is more to aid my memory the next time I have to set up a LAMP development environment on a fresh install of Ubuntu (can you tell what I’ve been up to this weekend?). The nice thing about starting from a blank slate is that it gives me a chance to really think through the overall installation setup and find solutions to issues that I’m normally too busy to track down.

Note: this is intended for local development purposes only, not production servers.

1. Set up the base LAMP system

   sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-cli php5-mysql mysql-server mysql-client

   Note: for ease of development access, I prefer to leave the root MySQL password blank.

2. Set up some optional but useful PHP modules

   sudo apt-get install php5-gd php5-curl php5-sqlite php-pear smarty

3. Set up subversion for source code control

   sudo apt-get install subversion

4. Set up postfix and alpine (like Pine) for sending and checking email locally

   sudo apt-get install postfix alpine

5. Prevent Apache error “Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name”

   echo "ServerName localhost" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf.d/fqdn

6. Enable public_html userdirs, e.g. http://localhost/~username/

   sudo a2enmod userdir

7. Enable url rewriting for pretty URLs

   sudo a2enmod rewrite

8. Restart Apache

   sudo service apache2 restart