Building a PHP 5 web server with MySQL 5 support isn’t as easy as it seems. We know this by heart: we spend literally a whole day last week trying to do this. The main problem is that PHP 5 doesn’t come with embedded support for MySQL and MySQL 5 does not provide a separated stand-alone client module ready for downloading and installing. In this step-by-step tutorial we will show you how to compile and install Apache 2, PHP 5 with MySQL 5 support and PHP optimization and caching system (Xcache) on Linux, so you will be able to build your own web server in a matter of minutes – and not hours like happened to us.

We got several error messages along the way, and we are going to publish the most common ones, so if you get the same messages you will know what to do.

The most important thing is that you need to upgrade your Linux version to its latest version, or at least check if libstdc++.so.6 is installed. It should be at /usr/lib/ directory (you can also try locate libstdc++.so.6 command). If you cannot find this file, you will get the following error message along the way:

error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This error happens because your system has an old version of C++ library, probably libstdc++.so.5. The solution is to update the C++ library. However, since almost everything on Linux depends on C++, you will have to upgrade a lot of stuff as well. On Debian, the Linux flavor we were using, it was easier to simply upgrade de whole system with the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

This will upgrade not only the C++ library but also update your Debian to its latest version. We recommend you performing these commands before starting the installation and configuration process.

Another trick for Debian users is to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and check from which server Debian will download files using apt commands like apt-get. By default you will see http://ftp.debian.org there, but this server is usually overloaded. You can comment the lines that point to debian.org and add new lines pointing to a faster mirror, for example:

deb http://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/debian stable main
deb-src http://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/debian stable main

A full list of mirrors is available here: http://www.debian.org/mirror/list. Scroll down and prefer using a secondary mirror, because they are usually less loaded, thus making all your installing and upgrading process a lot easier – especially for upgrading the whole operating system like we recommended.

After these preliminary explanations, let’s go to our step-by-step tutorial. Please notice that the following steps must be done on the same order we wrote: you cannot try to compile and install PHP 5 before MySQL 5 – it won’t work.