A very popular choice when setting up an Internet development environment is the LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Combining these four software packages makes for a solid and completely open-source base to develop websites and Internet applications on your own computer before publishing them online.

Step 0: Linux

I am going to assume the you have already set up a working computer with some flavor of Linux. The instructions here are for Ubuntu, but other distributions will be very similar.

Step 1: Apache

Apache HTTP Server is an extremely popular open-source web server. We are going to use it to host our local copies of the websites we are working on.
To install Apache on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install apache2

To check if it works, navigate to http://localhost/ with a browser. You should be greeted by a welcome page with some configuration details and a big friendly “It works!”.

Step 2: MySQL

The next item on our list is the database server. Technically a website doesn’t need a database, but the vast majority certainly do, especially when you start making something a little more complex. MySQL is a very popular choice for a data server.
Install MySQL server:

sudo apt install mysql-server

Whilst installing this may ask you to create a password for the root user. Pick one and remember it – you’ll need it later.
If it doesn’t, we need to set one. By default, MySQL server 5.7 leaves the root user password empty, but phpMyAdmin doesn’t allow us to log in without a password, so we need to set it. Summarizing from this guide:

1. Log in to MySQL by running sudo mysql -u root. Notice we don’t need a password for this.
2. Prevent user root from being authenticated with the auth_socket plugin and reset the password. Run ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'test';, where instead of test you’ll have your chosen password.
3. Disconnect by running exit and test by running mysql -u root -p. This should prompt you for the password you just gave.

Step 3: phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a very popular database client. This tool allows us to interact with the database through the browser, and create users, tables, etc.
Because phpMyAdmin requires PHP, that will also be installed if you don’t have it already.

sudo apt install phpmyadmin

If you have a web server other than apache2 installed, this will ask you which one should be configured to work with phpMyAdmin. Select apache2. Next, it will ask whether it should automatically configure the database. Go ahead and select “Yes”. Finally, you will be prompted to create a password, which phpMyAdmin will use to access the database.

Now if you navigate to http://localhost/phpmyadmin you’ll most likely get a 404 Not Found error. In order to properly configure Apache to work with phpMyAdmin, we’ll have to add phpMyAdmin’s configuration to Apache’s. This is pretty straightforward, actually: open /etc/apache2/apache2.conf with any text editor (make sure to use sudo!):

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Then add the following line to the bottom of the file, to include phpMyAdmin’s configuration:

# phpMyAdmin Configuration
Include  /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Save and close, then restart the Apache server:

sudo service apache2 restart

Hooray! Navigating to http://localhost/phpmyadmin should now greet you with the login page. You can use the user root and the password you created earlier when installing MySQL to log in the first time.