Configure Your Stuff

This is a instructional overview thread for those developers who are getting into setting up their own server with a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) setup. The linux distro referred to in this thread is a centOS (fedora|redhat) setup.

Before Anything

- Make sure that your actual RAM is the same amount that is displayed by the server (there could be some BIOS restrictions on RAM so check for that).

Linux OS Installation

- Use a server system for the type of install.
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- Setup you partitions with care:
- Make sure that everything other than /swap is an ext3 partition type.
- /swap (usually double the amount of space that your ram has but never larger than 4 gigs.
- /tmp (700meg is ok).
- /boot (100meg is ok).
- / (leave rest of the available space in the harddrive for this).
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- Use GRUB boot loader
- Use DCHP only if your IP address changes due to the network. If not, then assign the IP address of the box.
- Assign the netmask if DCHP is not in use.
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- When setting up the packages, select only what you need. Most of the time it's better to just install no packages and then install everything you need by yum (yellowdog update manager). If you do not select any packages, only the 1st CD of the linux install will be needed.

Linux OS Customizing

- Create a new user and provide it a password (with # passwd). Do not create a user with a generic or commonly known names used in any daemon programs (ex. mysql, apache, admin, user, php, postgresql).
- Disable the ROOT login in SSH (this means that when you login using the other user with SSH, you'll have to $ su to the root user).
- Install "Development Tools" with yum using group install if you plan to compile your own apache. If not then install apache with yum install apache.

Apache Settings

- Disable the extensions that you're not using for your website. If the server is only hosting one website, then there is no use for Virtual Hosts.
- Set the ServerLimit value to a suitable value so that users won't get locked out of the website.
- Change the User and Group directives to the newly created user.
- Set Options +Indexes to Options -Indexes so that the contents of directories w/o an index file will not be displayed.
- Change the DocumentRoot setting to the newly created user's home (~) directory. Or if you plan to use the default (/var/www/htdocs or /var/www/html) then assign the permissions of the user to that directory.
- Add apache as a start up program when the operating system boots up (this can be set in /etc/rc.d/local).
- Setup logs accordingly. If you setup image logging and your server has 20+ images per page then your website performance can suffer.
- Setup Error Logs to a suitable level.
- If any web pages are not displaying and the web server appears to be on when accessing it from the localhost (wget http://localhost) then disable or flush the iptables (/usr/sbin/iptables --fliush). You should also set this as a start up option for the OS.
- Use mod_rewrite to use modern URLs.

MySQL Settings

- Use --skip-name-resolve.
- Use --skip-bdb (if you're not using it).
- Use --skip-innodb (if you're not using it).
- Set a log for slow queries.
- Set the max_connections to a high value.
- Do not set a user with a wildcard ip-address. Only setup users with a specific ip.
- Use Query Caching for frequently used queries.

PHP Settings

- Disable Magic Quotes.
- Disable Register Globals.
- Disable Short Tags.
- Disable ERROR REPORTING if the website is not in development mode.
- Enable HTTP Only Session Cookies.
- Set Session Cookies to only be cookies (and not URL's).
- If sessions do not work, then set the session save path to a directory where the apache user has access to.
- Use Gzip Compression.

Optimizing Concepts

- Use an optcode cache for PHP (Eaccelerator).
- Consider using a static domain for CSS and JS files (this way the same cookies for the website won't be sent on each request).
- If your website uses alot of CSS and JS files per page, bundle all of them together into one request using mod_rewrite and php [url]
- For Apache, use the lingerD module (this reduces the amount of resources that are used when an apache connection is closed).

Here are some links for optimizing your server build:

- [url]
- [url]
- [url]