Set up a LAMP webserver stack

Read here: LAMP (software bundle) about the concept. This guide provides step by step instructions for installing a full featured LAMP stack on OpenWrt.

This article is a collection of examples of the configuration and integration of web servers, database servers and scripting languages, i.e. LAMP. For each example we assume to be creating a web page with /srv/www/ as the document root and assume an otherwise standard OpenWrt configuration. Note that it currently has a lot of overlap with the main articles for the respective services. It should be made more to the point and only about installing and especially integrating these services.

You might already have a web server for the Web UI installed and running. Choose any of the available WebServer for this purpose: webserver. If the web server is not in the OpenWrt packet repository, you could always crosscompile it from source.

→ http.uhttpd is an in-house web server under BSD-license. LuCI WebUI already uses this. If uHTTPd is not already installed you can install it with:

opkg update
opkg install uhttpd

The default image runs a WebUI for OpenWrt on port 80 (HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS). For our PHP5 enabled uHTTPd web server we start a new uHTTPd instance on a different port. We use port 81 here.

uci set uhttpd.llmp=uhttpd
uci set uhttpd.llmp.listen_http=81
uci set uhttpd.llmp.home=/srv/www
uci commit uhttpd

Create a directory for our web server content

mkdir -p $(uci get uhttpd.llmp.home)

If uHTTPd was already installed and running restart it now with

/etc/init.d/uhttpd restart

If you installed uHTTPd via opkg start the web server manually and also at boot by enabling the init script

/etc/init.d/uhttpd start
/etc/init.d/uhttpd enable

Further configuration can also be performed manually, e.g. to enable php. uhttpd

→ lighttpd is a lightweight and very flexible web server with lots of additional modules available.

opkg update
opkg install lighttpd lighttpd-mod-cgi

Edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and change a few settings:

Enable CGI:

Set the document root and the port for our example:

Edit /etc/php.ini and set the document root here as well (or leave it empty, in which case it allows PHP serving anywhere outside the docroot):

Create a directory for our web server content:

mkdir -p /srv/www

Start the server manually and also at boot by enabling the init script

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start
/etc/init.d/lighttpd enable

→ nginx is nice as well.

→ http.apache is nice as well.

Create a little test web page, e.g. /srv/www/index.html:

echo "<P>Hello, this web server runs on OpenWrt!!</P>" > /srv/www/index.html

Point your browser to the routers IP address and the port the web server is listening on (e. g. http://192.168.1.1:81/index.html)

See →php to install a version of PHP. The remainder of this section assumes you have a proper PHP install.

php

uci add_list uhttpd.llmp.interpreter=".php=/usr/bin/php-cgi"
uci set uhttpd.llmp.index_page="index.html index.htm default.html default.htm index.php"
uci commit uhttpd

sed -i 's,doc_root.*,doc_root = "",g' /etc/php.ini

sed -i 's,;short_open_tag = Off,short_open_tag = On,g' /etc/php.ini

Restart uHTTPd now with

/etc/init.d/uhttpd restart

Further configuration can also be performed manually, e.g. to enable php. uhttpd

php

In /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf set the following to activate PHP for files with .php extension.

Add index.php to the default file names, such that it loads it automatically if present.

Set the proper document root

Restart lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Configuring Apache and PHP5

php

We are using the phpinfo() function for a first test.

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /srv/www/index.php

Point your browser to the routers IP address and the port the web server is listening on (e. g. http://192.168.1.1:81/index.php)

If you get a blank page you can run your script with php-cgi from the router's shell to see if there are any errors

php-cgi /srv/www/index.php

database.overview

database.mysql

opkg update
opkg install libpthread libncurses libreadline mysql-server

sed -i 's,^datadir.*,datadir         = "/srv/mysql",g' /etc/my.cnf
sed -i 's,^tmpdir.*,tmpdir          = "/tmp",g' /etc/my.cnf

mkdir -p /srv/mysql
mysql_install_db --force

/etc/init.d/mysqld start
/etc/init.d/mysqld enable

mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

To enable MySQL in PHP install

opkg update
opkg install php5-mod-mysql

and load the mysql.so module in /etc/php.ini

sed -i 's,;extension=mysql.so,extension=mysql.so,g' /etc/php.ini

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=145009#p145009

To use the MySQLi module in PHP install

opkg update
opkg install php5-mod-mysqli

and load the mysqli.so module in /etc/php.ini

sed -i 's,;extension=mysqli.so,extension=mysqli.so,g' /etc/php.ini

Besides, in /etc/php.ini, duplicate the block named [MySQL] to [MySQLi] and rename all “mysql.”-options to “mysqli.”. To access a local MySQL server via socket, modify the value of “mysqli.default_socket” (which can be found in /etc/my.cnf):

mysqli.default_socket = /var/run/mysqld.sock

For MySQL to work with PHP, you must also configure the php.ini (vi /etc/php.ini) file, under the [MySQL] section.

• Here is an example:

[MySQL]
mysql.allow_local_infile = On
mysql.allow_persistent = On
mysql.cache_size = 2000
mysql.max_persistent = -1
mysql.max_links = -1
mysql.default_port = 3306
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/run/mysqld.sock
mysql.default_host = 127.0.0.1
mysql.default_user = root
mysql.default_password = MySuperSecretPassword
mysql.connect_timeout = 60
mysql.trace_mode = Off

database.postgresql