Install PHP on Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop

There are a few steps we need to perform

1. Install Apache
2. Install PHP
3. Configure “DirectoryIndex” on Apache

Installing Apache

open terminal (alt+ ctrl + t) and type the following command

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2

This will install an Apache web server on your machine. You can check the apache status by using the following command.

sudo service apache2 status

you should get output like following

Press ‘Esc’ ‘:’ ‘ q’ to exit from the above output

You can access the apache server by opening http://localhost on your browse. It will open the below default page.

Optionally you might have to install database server as well. You can install MySQL by the following command.

sudo apt install mysql-server

Your distribution might already have MySQL server already installed.

Visit this post If you want to configure MySQL server

2. Install PHP

User the following command to install PHP

sudo apt install php

It will install the latest version of PHP. php7.4 in my case at the time of this post.

You can check the installed version by the following command

php -v

In addition to the PHP package, you’ll need php-mysql, a PHP module that allows PHP to communicate with MySQL-based databases. You’ll also need libapache2-mod-php to enable Apache to handle PHP files. You can install these packages using the following command

sudo apt install libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

3. Configure DirectoryIndex

We have completed installing PHP. We will change the execution preference to PHP over HTML page.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf

Nano is an editor you can use the editor of your chose. I am using nano for this post. Nano commands: ‘ctrl + o: write to file’, ‘ctrl +x: exit nano’

You will find the following contents in that

<IfModule mod_dir.c>
        DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>

Change the sequence of the DirectoryIndex as follows

<IfModule mod_dir.c>
        DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>

Restart apache

sudo service apache2 restart

Now test whether our apache is executing PHP files

Create a new page on the apache document root. The default document root for apache is ‘/var/www/html’. You can check the document root for apache as follows.

grep -i 'DocumentRoot' /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Now create a new file in the document root. Before that, we need to change the permission of the document root folder.

As you can see the HTML folder is owned by root, so you can’t create new files or folders in that folder. Change ower to your login user using the following command

sudo chown -R PLACE-YOUR-USERNAME_HERE /var/www/html/ 

(ps. This is not recommended on production server please refer this article to set up production server)

Now we can create a new file in the document root.

nano /var/www/html/first.php

Write some PHP script in the file

<?php
echo "My First PHP site";
?>

Now you can check access your file on the browser as http://localhost/first.php