How to Install Apache 2.4 & PHP 7.3 on Amazon Linux

This tutorial will help you for installing Apache/HTTPD 2.4 and PHP 7 on Amazon Linux system.

MySQL installation is not part of this tutorial. So if you also need MySQL server on your Amazon Linux, follow this tutorial.

Step 1 – Initial Setup

Log in to your Amazon Linux system via SSH and become root user. Then update yum to the latest.

sudo su -
yum -y update

Its optional part to set the proper timezone as per your requirements. The below commands will change system Timezone to ‘America/New_York’.

mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime

Step 2 – Install Apache 2.4

Now install the Apache/httpd web server with other recommended extensions form the default yum repositories.

yum install -y httpd24 httpd24-tools mod24_ssl

The httpd24 package will install Apache 2.4 and mod24_ssl extension will provide cryptographic support to your Apache web server.

After installation set Apache to auto-start and also start once.

chkconfig httpd on
service httpd start

Step 3 – Install PHP 7.3

After that install PHP 7.3 with some frequently used extensions.

yum install -y php73 php73-devel php73-mysql php73-pdo php73-mbstring
yum install -y php73-gd php73-xml php73-xmlrpc php73-mcrypt php-pear

If you need to install other version like PHP 7.2 change all packages names accordingly like php72 or php71 etc.

Step 4 – Create VirtualHost

After installing packages create your first virtual host. To create virtual host for your domain example.com, edit the Apache configuration file and create virtual host like below:

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

After changing restart Apache service

service httpd start

Test PHP Version with Apache

Finally, create a PHP script with phpinfo() function and upload to document root directory.

vim /var/www/html/info.php 

Now, access php script in web browser.

http://www.example.com/info.php