How to Install PHP on Apache on Raspberry Pi

In this post, we are going to learn how to install PHP on a Debian-based operating system like Raspbian on Raspberry Pi.

PHP is a widely used language for serving dynamic content and is a common component of a server. Together with Apache and MySQL/MariaDB, it forms part of the “LAMP” stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP).

Installing PHP on Raspberry Pi is very easy through the APT package manager. Simply, in a command console, we do:

That simple. Now, it’s a good idea to modify the Apache configuration because, by default, if it finds an ‘index.html’ file, it will prioritize this over an ‘index.php’. Normally we want the opposite behavior, so we are going to change it.

To do this, we do:

In the file content, we will find the following:

We modify it, moving ‘index.php’ to the left:

Close the file and restart Apache by doing:

To test that PHP is working correctly, let’s create a simple file by doing:

Inside it, we simply put the following content:

Now we access the file’s local URL with the browser.

If you see the following, congratulations, PHP is working correctly.

Finally, we delete the test file we created:

That’s how easy it is to install PHP on Raspberry Pi! In upcoming posts, we will see how to install MySQL and MariaDB to configure our LAMP stack. See you soon!