Install LEMP Stack (Nginx, MariaDB, PHP7.2) on RHEL 8/CentOS 8

This tutorial is going to show you how to install LEMP stack on RHEL 8 and CentOS 8.

What’s LEMP Stack?

A software stack is a set of software tools bundled together. LEMP stands for Linux, Nginx (pronounced engine X), MariaDB/MySQL and PHP, all of which are open source. It is the most common software stack that powers dynamic websites and web applications. Linux is the operating system; Nginx is the web server; MariaDB/MySQL is the database server and PHP is the server-side scripting language responsible for generating dynamic web pages.

Prerequisites

You can download and install RHEL 8 by following the tutorial below.

How to Download and Install RHEL 8 for Free

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This tutorial uses root account to manage administration tasks. To switch to root, run the following command and enter root password.

su -

Step 1: Install Nginx Web Server on RHEL 8/CentOS 8

Nginx is a high performance web server and very popular these days. It also can be used as a reverse proxy and caching server. Enter this command to install Nginx Web server.

yum install nginx -y

After it’s installed, we can start Nginx with this command:

systemctl start nginx

Enable Nginx to auto start at system boot time by running the following command.

systemctl enable nginx

Now check its status.

systemctl status nginx

Output:

● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server

 Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)

 Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-12-05 02:04:00 EST; 7s ago

 Main PID: 5032 (nginx)

 Tasks: 2 (limit: 11512)

 Memory: 8.4M

 CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service

 ├─5032 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx

 └─5034 nginx: worker process

“Enabled” indicates that auto start at boot time is enabled and we can see that Nginx is running. Notice that the above command will not immediately quit after running. You need to press “q” to make it quit.

Check Nginx version.

nginx -v

Output:

nginx version: nginx/1.14.1

If you are installing LEMP on your local RHEL 8/CentOS 8 computer, then type 127.0.0.1 or localhost in the browser address bar. You should see the “Welcome to Nginx” Web page, which means Nginx Web server is running properly.

By default, RHEL 8/CentOS 8 forbids public access to port 80. To allow other computers to access the web page, we need to open port 80 in firewalld, the dynamic firewall manager on RHEL/CentOS. Run the following command to open port 80.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http

If you want to enable HTTPS on Nginx later, then you also need to open port 443.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https

The --permanent option will make this firewall rule persistent across system reboots. Next, reload the firewall daemon for the change to take effect.

systemctl reload firewalld

Now the Nginx web page is accessible publicly.

Finally, we need to make user nginx as the owner of web directory. By default it’s owned by the root user.

chown nginx:nginx /usr/share/nginx/html -R

Step 2: Install MariaDB Database Server on RHEL 8/CentOS 8

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It is developed by former members of MySQL team who are concerned that Oracle might turn MySQL into a closed-source product. Enter the following command to install MariaDB on RHEL 8/CentOS 8.

yum install mariadb-server mariadb -y

After it’s installed, we need to start it.

systemctl start mariadb

Enable auto start at system boot time.

systemctl enable mariadb

Check status:

systemctl status mariadb

output:

● mariadb.service - MariaDB 10.3 database server

 Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/mariadb.service; enabled; vendor preset: disable>

 Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-12-05 02:40:44 EST; 8s ago

 Docs: man:mysqld(8)

 https://mariadb.com/kb/en/library/systemd/

 Main PID: 17582 (mysqld)

 Status: "Taking your SQL requests now..."

 Tasks: 30 (limit: 11512)

 Memory: 75.2M

 CGroup: /system.slice/mariadb.service

 └─17582 /usr/libexec/mysqld --basedir=/usr

“Enabled” indicates that auto start at boot time is enabled and we can see that MariaDB server is running. Now we need to run the security script.

mysql_secure_installation

When it asks you to enter MariaDB root password, press Enter key as the root password isn’t set yet. Then enter y to set the root password for MariaDB server.

Next, you can press Enter to answer all remaining questions, which will remove anonymous user, disable remote root login and remove test database. This step is a basic requirement for MariaDB database security. (Note that the letter Y is capitalized, which means it’s the default answer.)

Now you can run the following command and enter MariaDB root password to log into MariaDB shell.

mysql -u root -p

To exit, run

exit;

Step 3: Install PHP-FPM on RHEL 8/CentOS 8

Install PHP and related modules using the following command:

yum install php php-mysqlnd php-fpm php-opcache php-gd php-xml php-mbstring -y

After it’s installed, we need to start it.

systemctl start php-fpm

Enable auto start at system boot time.

systemctl enable php-fpm

Check status:

systemctl status php-fpm

output:

● php-fpm.service - The PHP FastCGI Process Manager

 Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/php-fpm.service; enabled; vendor preset: disable>

 Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-12-05 03:06:01 EST; 22s ago

 Main PID: 18631 (php-fpm)

 Status: "Processes active: 0, idle: 5, Requests: 0, slow: 0, Traffic: 0req/sec"

 Tasks: 6 (limit: 11512)

 Memory: 29.6M

 CGroup: /system.slice/php-fpm.service

 ├─18631 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php-fpm.conf)

 ├─18632 php-fpm: pool www

“Enabled” indicates that auto start at boot time is enabled and we can see that PHP-FPM is running. Now edit the PHP-FPM config file:

nano /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

By default, PHP-FPM runs as the apache user. Since we are using Nginx web server, we need to change it. Find the following two lines.

user = apache

group = apache

Change them to

user = nginx

group = nginx

In this file you can find the following line.

listen = /run/php-fpm/www.sock

This indicates that PHP-FPM is listening on a Unix socket instead of a TCP/IP socket, which is good. Save and close the file. Reload PHP-FPM for the changes to take effect.

systemctl reload php-fpm

Step 4: Test PHP

By default, the Nginx package on RHEL 8/CentOS 8 includes configurations for PHP-FPM (/etc/nginx/conf.d/php-fpm.conf and /etc/nginx/default.d/php.conf). To test PHP-FPM with Nginx Web server, we need to create a info.php file in the document root directory.

nano /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php

Paste the following PHP code into the file.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Save and close the file. If you installed LEMP stack on a local RHEL 8/CentOS 8 server, type in 127.0.0.1/info.php or localhost/info.php in the browser address bar. You should see your server’s PHP information. This means PHP scripts can run properly with Nginx web server.

If RHEL 8/CentOS is running on a remote server, then enter server-ip-address/info.php in browser address bar. Replace sever-ip-address with your actual IP address.

If the browser fails to display the PHP info but prompt you to download the info.php file, simply restart Nginx and PHP-FPM.

sudo systemctl restart nginx php-fpm

Then you should be able to see the PHP info in the web browser.

Nginx Automatic Restart

If for any reason your Nginx process is killed, you need to run the following command to restart it.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Instead of manually typing this command, we can make Nginx automatically restart by editing the nginx.service systemd service unit. To override the default systemd service configuration, we create a separate directory.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service.d/

Then create a file under this directory.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service.d/restart.conf

Add the following lines in the file, which will make Nginx automatically restart 5 seconds after a failure is detected.

[Service]

Restart=always

RestartSec=5s

Save and close the file. Then reload systemd.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

To check if this would work, kill Nginx with:

sudo pkill nginx

Then check Nginx status. You will find Nginx automatically restarted.

systemctl status nginx