How to Install Apache 2.4 & PHP 7.4 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 2 system via SSH. Its good to keep pacakges up to date, so execute the following command to update yum packages to latest:

sudo yum update -y 

Step 2 – Install Apache 2.4

The Apache (httpd) packages are available under the default yum repositories on Amazon Linux 2 systems.

Execute the following command to Apache with mod_ssl on your system.

sudo yum install -y httpd httpd-tools mod_ssl 

The httpd package will install Apache (HTTPD) and mod_ssl extension will provide cryptographic support to your Apache web server.

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

sudo systemctl enable httpd 
sudo systemctl start httpd 

Apache has been installed on your Amazon Linux system. Access to the server in a web browser using IP address, This will show you the default Apache page.

Step 3 – Installing PHP

PHP latest versions are available under amazon-linux-extras repositories. Make sure you have installed extras repository on your system.

To install amazon-linux-extras package, type:

sudo yum install amazon-linux-extras -y

Once the extras repository is configured on your system. Search for the available PHP versions under the extras repository.

sudo amazon-linux-extras | grep php 

  _  php7.2                   available    \
  _  lamp-mariadb10.2-php7.2  available    \
  _  php7.3                   available    \
 42  php7.4=latest            enabled      [ =stable ]

Next, enable the desired topic for PHP version. The following command will enable PHP 7.4 topic on your Amazon Linux 2 system. You can also choose another PHP version’s listed in above command:

sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.4 

Finally, install the required PHP packages along with the required PHP extensions.

sudo yum clean metadata 
sudo yum install php php-common php-pear 
sudo yum install php-{cgi,curl,mbstring,gd,mysqlnd,gettext,json,xml,fpm,intl,zip}  

PHP has been successfully installed on your Amazon Linux machine.

Type below command to check PHP version:

php -v 

PHP 7.4.11 (cli) (built: Oct 21 2020 19:12:26) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

To check active version for Apache, create a PHP info file under default document root using the following command.

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/info.php 

The access the info.php file in a web browser:

http://server-ip/info.php

Step 4 – Create A New Virtual Host

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.d/example.com.conf 

After changing restart Apache service

sudo systemctl restart httpd 

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned to install Apache 2.4 and PHP 7 on your Amazon Linux machine.