How to Install PHP on Apache on Raspberry Pi

PHP is a programming language widely used to generate dynamic web content on the server.

On a Raspberry Pi, PHP can be useful for building web dashboards, internal tools, or lightweight applications. Together with Apache and MySQL/MariaDB it is part of the “LAMP” stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP).

Installing PHP on Raspberry Pi OS 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!