How to install LEMP stack (nginx, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP) on CentOS

The LEMP stack is an increasingly popular web service stack, powering mission-critical web services in many production environments. As the name implies, the LEMP stack is composed of Linux, nginx, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP. nginx is a high performance and lightweight replacement of slow and hard-to-scale Apache HTTP server used in the traditional LAMP stack. MariaDB is a community-driven fork of MySQL, with more features and better performance. PHP, a server-side language for generating dynamic content, is processed by PHP-FPM, an enhanced implementation of PHP FastCGI.

In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to set up the LEMP stack on CentOS platforms. I target both CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 platforms, and point out differences where necessary.

Step One: Nginx

As the first step, let's install nginx on CentOS, and do basic configuration for nginx, such as enabling auto-start and customizing the firewall.

Install Nginx

Let's install a pre-built stable version of nginx package from its official RPM source.

On CentOS 7:

$ sudo rpm --import http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key

$ sudo rpm -ivh http://nginx.org/packages/centos/7/noarch/RPMS/nginx-release-centos-7-0.el7.ngx.noarch.rpm

$ sudo yum install nginx

On CentOS 6:

$ sudo rpm --import http://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key

$ sudo rpm -ivh http://nginx.org/packages/centos/6/noarch/RPMS/nginx-release-centos-6-0.el6.ngx.noarch.rpm

$ sudo yum install nginx

Note that if you do not import the official nginx GPG key before installing nginx RPM, you will get this warning:

warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.KttVHD: Header V4 RSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 7bd9bf62: NOKEY

Start Nginx 

 After installation, nginx does not start automatically. Let's start nginx right now, and configure it to auto-start upon boot. Also, we need to open a TCP/80 port in the firewall so that you can access nginx webserver remotely. All of these are achieved by entering the following commands.

OnCentOS 7:

$ sudo service nginx start

$ sudo chkconfig nginx on

$ sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

$ sudo service iptables save

Test Nginx

The default document root directory of nginx is /usr/share/nginx/html. A default index.html file must be already placed in this directory. Let's check if you can access this test web page by going to http://<nginx-ip-address>/