As I am currently playing around with CodeIgniter (an open source PHP web application framework), I thought I could write down the few software installation steps one needs to go through in order to get started on a fresh Ubuntu box. And all you really need is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) setup that can be up and running in less than 10 minutes (assuming the OS is already installed of course).

Install Apache

sudo apt-get install apache2

Install MySQL

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Install PHP (with MySQL support)

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-mysql

Enable the rewrite mod in Apache

This is only needed if you plan to get rid off “index.php” in your CodeIgniter application’s URLs.

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

<!-- Edit the configuration and change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All -->
<Directory /var/www/>
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   allow from all
</Directory>

Add your site to your local web server

You could probably just extract the CodeIgniter archive into /var/www/ but you also could have your application in your home folder (/home/scandinabox/www.mysite.com/ for instance). In that case, all you need to do is create a symbolic link in the Apache web directory pointing to your application folder.

cd /var/www
sudo ln -s /home/scandinabox/www.mysite.com/ www.mysite.com

Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Here you go, just point your web browser to http://localhost/www.mysite.com/ and you should see the CodeIgniter example pages.