Install Lampp in Linux Mint

This is an in-depth guide to installing LAMPP on Linux Mint. LAMPP, the linux version of XAMPP, is a popular open source, cross platform web server software that includes Apache, MYSQL, PHP and Perl. This software can be installed locally on your PC to aid with the development of websites that use the server side scripting language PHP, like WordPress themes for example. This tutorial will help install the software, create and setup shortcut within the menu editor and transferring files with proFTP. This tutorial should also work in Ubuntu too, so lets get started.

Download Lampp

Firstly download LAMPP from it’s respective website and place it in your home folder e.g. where documents and downloads are.

Open a terminal and type:

ls

Hit enter to display a list of files and folders. Your file should be in there.

Then type the following ensuring that it matches your downloaded file.

sudo tar xvf xampp-linux-1.7.2.tar.gz -C/opt

Enter your password. The software is being extracted into the opt directory within your root folder.

To start the server type

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

Now open a browser and type https://localhost/

You should now see that the server is working. If you click on security on the left hand side you see that there are warnings. Everything is at its default values and therefore you need execute a little program in your terminal.

So head back to the terminal and type the following.

sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security

Read on the on-screen guide and change your passwords to secure your data. Please write them down!
If you hover back over to the security section once finished you will see that everything is green and your web server is secure.

Now if you are anything like me and you want a shortcut in your menu then right click on your menu icon, usually at the bottom left of your screen, select edit menus.
Update for Ubuntu 11.10 users There is no edit menu shortcut so instead you can create a desktop icon by opening the menu editor using the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and enter the following.

gnome-desktop-item-edit ~/Desktop/ --create-new

This will open the launcher properties as indicated below.

*Please note that at the time of writing this article the default mint menu doesn’t work so please default to the gnome menu. Right click on the taskbar and click add to panel, click on Main Menu.

Click on programming and click on new item enter the following

• Type: Application
• Name: Xampp
• Command: gksu /opt/lampp/share/xampp-control-panel/xampp-control-panel
• Comment: Web Server

If you want a lovely icon then click on the picture and navigate to
/opt/lampp/htdocs/xampp/img/logo-big.gif

You can now see it in your menu, execute it and enter your password, the LAMPP control panel should be displayed. You can start all of your services or selected services from here.

Now all that is done we will setup FTP so that we can tranfer the files over to our root folder. Make sure that your proFTP is running. I use filezilla as my choice of FTP programs, so install Filezilla from your mintInstall or synaptic. Start filezilla and click on new site manager.
enter the following details, remembering your password which you created earlier!

Then as in the screenshot I uploaded my tester.htm into the tester folder which I created in filezilla.

As you can see in this final screenshot the tester file is now on screen and is working.