Raspberry Pi as web server

my first project is to turn my Raspberry into a small web server. For this I was to use the following things:

• Apache2 as web server
• PHP 5 as script language
• MySQL as database
• FTP Server

Apache2

First we have to check if the user group for the web server exists:

sudo groupadd www-data
sudo usermod -a -G www-data www-data

Normally this step is not needed.

After that, we can install Apache with a packet manager:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Done. Now with localhost in our Browser on the Raspberry Pi we should se a message.

PHP 5

Php 5 can also be installed easily with the packet manager:

sudo apt-get install php5

Thats all! But for a web server you may need some additional packets that works with PHP 5:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-perl2 php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-imap php5-ldap php5-mhash php5-mysql php5-odbc

MySQL

MySQL is a very popular database for web servers. I personally use PostgreSQL. You can install MySQL with the following command:

apt-get install mysql-server

During installation the root password for the database is needed.
If you want to avoid problems, you should reboot you Raspberry now. I wanted to skip this step and got error messages like ‚packet mysql-server-5.5 is not yet configured‘.

PHPMyAdmin

PHPMyAdmin is a smart web client for MySQL. It can be installed the following way:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

Here we get a dialog where we use Apache2 as web server.

PhpMyAdmin also needs to create tables in your database. So there will be a dialog where it is asked if it is allowed to do that. We want this and we also need to set a new PhpMyAdmin password.

FTP

To get our program source code to the server we need a FTP connection. For this we install ProFTP.

sudo apt-get install proftpd

During installation we choose ’standalone‘.

Configuration

For our FTP server we don’t need real Unix users, but some virtual ones. For this we change the following file:

sudo nano /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

we add the following lines at the end:

DefaultRoot ~
AuthOrder mod_auth_file.c  mod_auth_unix.c
AuthUserFile /etc/proftpd/ftpd.passwd
AuthPAM off
RequireValidShell off

Now we create a virtual User (for me the username is hansi):

cd /etc/proftpd/
sudo ftpasswd --passwd --name hansi --uid 33 --gid 33 --home /var/www/ --shell /bin/false

Now you will be asked to set a password for the FTP user. This FTP user now has read and write permissions for your web server root directory. We only need to set some rights:

sudo chmod g+s /var/www
sudo chmod 775 /var/www
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

The last thing is to restart out FTP server daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd restart