Introduction

A “LAMP” stack is a group of open source software that is typically installed together to enable a server to host dynamic websites and web apps. This term is actually an acronym which represents the Linux operating system, with the Apache web server. The site data is stored in a MySQL database (using MariaDB), and dynamic content is processed by PHP.

In this guide, we’ll get a LAMP stack installed on an CentOS 7 VPS. CentOS will fulfill our first requirement: a Linux operating system.

Note: The LAMP stack can be installed automatically on your Droplet by adding this script to its User Data when launching it. Check out this tutorial to learn more about Droplet User Data.

Prerequisites

Before you begin with this guide, you should have a separate, non-root user account set up on your server.

Step One — Install Apache

The Apache web server is currently the most popular web server in the world, which makes it a great default choice for hosting a website.

We can install Apache easily using CentOS’s package manager, yum. A package manager allows us to install most software pain-free from a repository maintained by CentOS.

For our purposes, we can get started by typing these commands:

sudo yum install httpd

Since we are using a sudo command, these operations get executed with root privileges. It will ask you for your regular user’s password to verify your intentions.

Afterwards, your web server is installed.

Once it installs, you can start Apache on your VPS:

sudo systemctl start httpd.service

You can do a spot check right away to verify that everything went as planned by visiting your server’s public IP address in your web browser (see the note under the next heading to find out what your public IP address is if you do not have this information already):

http://your_server_IP_address/

You will see the default CentOS 7 Apache web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:

If you see this page, then your web server is now correctly installed.

The last thing you will want to do is enable Apache to start on boot. Use the following command to do so:

sudo systemctl enable httpd.service

How To Find your Server’s Public IP Address

If you do not know what your server’s public IP address is, there are a number of ways you can find it. Usually, this is the address you use to connect to your server through SSH.

From the command line, you can find this a few ways. First, you can use the iproute2 tools to get your address by typing this:

ip addr show eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2; }' | sed 's/\/.*$//'

This will give you one or two lines back. They are both correct addresses, but your computer may only be able to use one of them, so feel free to try each one.

An alternative method is to use an outside party to tell you how it sees your server. You can do this by asking a specific server what your IP address is:

curl http://icanhazip.com

Regardless of the method you use to get your IP address, you can type it into your web browser’s address bar to get to your server.

Step Two — Install MySQL (MariaDB)

Now that we have our web server up and running, it is time to install MariaDB, a MySQL drop-in replacement. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system. Basically, it will organize and provide access to databases where our site can store information.

Again, we can use yum to acquire and install our software. This time, we’ll also install some other “helper” packages that will assist us in getting our components to communicate with each other:

sudo yum install mariadb-server mariadb

When the installation is complete, we need to start MariaDB with the following command:

sudo systemctl start mariadb

Now that our MySQL database is running, we want to run a simple security script that will remove some dangerous defaults and lock down access to our database system a little bit. Start the interactive script by running:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The prompt will ask you for your current root password. Since you just installed MySQL, you most likely won’t have one, so leave it blank by pressing enter. Then the prompt will ask you if you want to set a root password. Go ahead and enter Y, and follow the instructions:

Enter current password for root (enter for none):
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

Setting the root password ensures that nobody can log into the MariaDB
root user without the proper authorization.

New password: password
Re-enter new password: password
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
 ... Success!

For the rest of the questions, you should simply hit the “ENTER” key through each prompt to accept the default values. This will remove some sample users and databases, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes we have made.

The last thing you will want to do is enable MariaDB to start on boot. Use the following command to do so:

sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

At this point, your database system is now set up and we can move on.

Step Three — Install PHP

PHP is the component of our setup that will process code to display dynamic content. It can run scripts, connect to our MySQL databases to get information, and hand the processed content over to our web server to display.

We can once again leverage the yum system to install our components. We’re going to include the php-mysql package as well:

sudo yum install php php-mysql

This should install PHP without any problems. We need to restart the Apache web server in order for it to work with PHP. You can do this by typing this:

sudo systemctl restart httpd.service

Install PHP Modules

To enhance the functionality of PHP, we can optionally install some additional modules.

To see the available options for PHP modules and libraries, you can type this into your system:

yum search php-

The results are all optional components that you can install. It will give you a short description for each:

php-bcmath.x86_64 : A module for PHP applications for using the bcmath library
php-cli.x86_64 : Command-line interface for PHP
php-common.x86_64 : Common files for PHP
php-dba.x86_64 : A database abstraction layer module for PHP applications
php-devel.x86_64 : Files needed for building PHP extensions
php-embedded.x86_64 : PHP library for embedding in applications
php-enchant.x86_64 : Enchant spelling extension for PHP applications
php-fpm.x86_64 : PHP FastCGI Process Manager
php-gd.x86_64 : A module for PHP applications for using the gd graphics library
. . .

To get more information about what each module does, you can either search the internet, or you can look at the long description in the package by typing:

yum info package_name

There will be a lot of output, with one field called Description which will have a longer explanation of the functionality that the module provides.

For example, to find out what the php-fpm module does, we could type this:

yum info php-fpm

Along with a large amount of other information, you’ll find something that looks like this:

. . .
Summary     : PHP FastCGI Process Manager
URL         : http://www.php.net/
License     : PHP and Zend and BSD
Description : PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI
            : implementation with some additional features useful for sites of
            : any size, especially busier sites.

If, after researching, you decide you would like to install a package, you can do so by using the yum install command like we have been doing for our other software.

If we decided that php-fpm is something that we need, we could type:

sudo yum install php-fpm

If you want to install more than one module, you can do that by listing each one, separated by a space, following the yum install command, like this:

sudo yum install package1 package2 ...

At this point, your LAMP stack is installed and configured. We should still test out our PHP though.

Step Four — Test PHP Processing on your Web Server

In order to test that our system is configured properly for PHP, we can create a very basic PHP script.

We will call this script info.php. In order for Apache to find the file and serve it correctly, it must be saved to a very specific directory, which is called the “web root”.

In CentOS 7, this directory is located at /var/www/html/. We can create the file at that location by typing:

sudo vi /var/www/html/info.php

This will open a blank file. We want to put the following text, which is valid PHP code, inside the file:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

When you are finished, save and close the file.

If you are running a firewall, run the following commands to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http 
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Now we can test whether our web server can correctly display content generated by a PHP script. To try this out, we just have to visit this page in our web browser. You’ll need your server’s public IP address again.

The address you want to visit will be:

http://your_server_IP_address/info.php

The page that you come to should look something like this:

This page basically gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly.

If this was successful, then your PHP is working as expected.

You probably want to remove this file after this test because it could actually give information about your server to unauthorized users. To do this, you can type this:

sudo rm /var/www/html/info.php

You can always recreate this page if you need to access the information again later.

Conclusion

Now that you have a LAMP stack installed, you have many choices for what to do next. Basically, you’ve installed a platform that will allow you to install most kinds of websites and web software on your server.

Introduction

WordPress is a free and open source website and blogging tool that uses PHP and MySQL. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS (Content Management System) on the Internet and has over 20,000 plugins to extend its functionality. This makes WordPress a great choice for getting a website up and running quickly and easily.

In this guide, we will demonstrate how to get a WordPress instance set up with an Apache web server on CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

Before you begin with this guide, there are a few steps that need to be completed first.

You will need a CentOS 7 server installed and configured with a non-root user that has sudoprivileges.

Additionally, you’ll need to have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack installed on your CentOS 7 server. If you don’t have these components already installed or configured, you can use this guide to learn how to install LAMP on CentOS 7.

When you are finished with these steps, you can continue with the installation of WordPress.

Step One — Create a MySQL Database and User for WordPress

The first step that we will take is in preparation. WordPress uses a relational database to manage information for the site and its users. We have MariaDB (a fork of MySQL) installed already, which can provide this functionality, but we need to make a database and a user for WordPress to work with.

To get started, log into MySQL’s root (administrative) account by issuing this command:

mysql -u root -p

You will be prompted for the password that you set for the root account when you installed MySQL. Once that password is submitted, you will be given a MySQL command prompt.

First, we’ll create a new database that WordPress can control. You can call this whatever you would like, but I will be calling it wordpress for this example.

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

Note: Every MySQL statement or command must end in a semi-colon (;), so check to make sure that this is present if you are running into any issues.

Next, we are going to create a new MySQL user account that we will use exclusively to operate on WordPress’s new database. Creating one-function databases and accounts is a good idea, as it allows for better control of permissions and other security needs.

I am going to call the new account wordpressuser and will assign it a password of password. You should definitely use a different username and password, as these examples are not very secure.

CREATE USER wordpressuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

At this point, you have a database and user account that are each specifically made for WordPress. However, the user has no access to the database. We need to link the two components together by granting our user access to the database.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wordpressuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Now that the user has access to the database, we need to flush the privileges so that MySQL knows about the recent privilege changes that we’ve made:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Once these commands have all been executed, we can exit out of the MySQL command prompt by typing:

exit

You should now be back to your regular SSH command prompt.

Step Two — Install WordPress

Before we download WordPress, there is one PHP module that we need to install to ensure that it works properly. Without this module, WordPress will not be able to resize images to create thumbnails. We can get that package directly from CentOS’s default repositories using yum:

sudo yum install php-gd

Now we need to restart Apache so that it recognizes the new module:

sudo service httpd restart

We are now ready to download and install WordPress from the project’s website. Luckily, the WordPress team always links the most recent stable version of their software to the same URL, so we can get the most up-to-date version of WordPress by typing this:

cd ~
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

This will download a compressed archive file that contains all of the WordPress files that we need. We can extract the archived files to rebuild the WordPress directory with tar:

tar xzvf latest.tar.gz

You will now have a directory called wordpress in your home directory. We can finish the installation by transferring the unpacked files to Apache’s document root, where it can be served to visitors of our website. We can transfer our WordPress files there with rsync, which will preserve the files’ default permissions:

sudo rsync -avP ~/wordpress/ /var/www/html/

rysnc will safely copy all of the contents from the directory you unpacked to the document root at /var/www/html/. However, we still need to add a folder for WordPress to store uploaded files. We can do that with the mkdir command:

mkdir /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads

Now we need to assign the correct ownership and permissions to our WordPress files and folders. This will increase security while still allowing WordPress to function as intended. To do this, we’ll use chown to grant ownership to Apache’s user and group:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/*

With this change, the web server will be able to create and modify WordPress files, and will also allow us to upload content to the server.

Step Three — Configure WordPress

Most of the configuration required to use WordPress will be completed through a web interface later on. However, we need to do some work from the command line to ensure that WordPress can connect to the MySQL database that we created for it.

Begin by moving into the Apache root directory where you installed WordPress:

cd /var/www/html

The main configuration file that WordPress relies on is called wp-config.php. A sample configuration file that mostly matches the settings we need is included by default. All we have to do is copy it to the default configuration file location, so that WordPress can recognize and use the file:

cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Now that we have a configuration file to work with, let’s open it in a text editor:

nano wp-config.php

The only modifications we need to make to this file are to the parameters that hold our database information. We will need to find the section titled MySQL settings and change the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD variables in order for WordPress to correctly connect and authenticate to the database that we created.

Fill in the values of these parameters with the information for the database that you created. It should look like this:

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wordpressuser');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password');

These are the only values that you need to change, so save and close the file when you are finished.

Step Four — Complete Installation Through the Web Interface

Now that you have your files in place and your software is configured, you can complete the WordPress installation through the web interface. In your web browser, navigate to your server’s domain name or public IP address:

http://server_domain_name_or_IP

First, you will need to select the language that you would like to install WordPress with. After selecting a language and clicking on Continue, you will be presented with the WordPress initial configuration page, where you will create an initial administrator account:

Fill out the information for the site and administrative account that you wish to make. When you are finished, click on the Install WordPress button at the bottom to continue.

WordPress will confirm the installation, and then ask you to log in with the account that you just created:

To continue, hit the Log in button at the bottom, then fill out your administrator account information:

After hitting Log in, you will be presented with your new WordPress dashboard:

Today, many organisations and enterprises are moving into a more hybrid cloud environment. And why not? Hybrid clouds are agile – they adapt and change to the needs of the organisation. With their unique mix of private,on-premises clouds and public clouds, you can get the scalability, low cost and reliability of a public cloud, while you can get the security, control and customisation and flexibility of a private cloud- It is the best of both worlds. It is projected that by 2020, almost 90 per cent of organisations would have shifted to a hybrid cloud environment (source). However, due to this flexibility and these two worlds (private and public) the security of a hybrid cloud becomes a bit more challenging. In this article, we’re going to look at how to secure hybrid cloud.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Simply put, a hybrid cloud is an environment that uses a mix of third-party public clouds and on-premises, private cloud – with orchestration between the two. When workloads move between these two platforms – the private and public clouds – you get greater flexibility and more data deployment options. This allows you to respond to computing changes and business needs with agility. Sounds good right?

In order to establish this unique cloud computing environment, you need the availability of a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS (Amazon Web Services) Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Secondly, you need the construction of a private cloud (either through a cloud provider or on your own premises). The third component is a good Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity between the public and private cloud. Finally, you need to make sure that your Hybrid Cloud is secure. This is where the matter of hybrid cloud security comes in – why is it important and what does it entail?

Hybrid Cloud Security

While you may have a firm grip on the data in your own private cloud, once you begin to venture into the public cloud space, things become more complex. As more enterprises move to a hybrid cloud environment, more data security concerns arise. These are the top concerns:

1. Cross-Cloud Policy Management:
   While policies and procedures within the organisation’s private data centre are set, these policies might not transfer well when it comes to the public cloud. Therefore, the challenge is to create, configure and maintain a security policy that is uniform across the entire network. This includes firewall rules, user identification/ authentication and IPS signatures amongst other things.
2. Data Leaks:
   A key issue for data security administrators is data visibility. When it comes to deciding where data should be stored, organisations must put in the time, care and a tremendous amount of thought. And even then, it’s easy to lose track of the data without ensuring proper data visibility.
3. Data compliance: 
   Before organisations can move data and applications to a service provider cloud, they must make sure they understand all regulatory compliance laws that apply to their data – whether that’s customer credit card data or data spread across multiple geographical locations. Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the organisation to make sure data of any nature is well-protected. Cloud providers and Cloud web hosting service providers will tell organisations which compliance standards they adhere to. If more is required then the responsibility lies with the organisation to spell out those needs.
4. Scalability: 
   All security tools, procedures and practices need to be scaled for growth. If that hasn’t been done, companies can hit roadblocks because they neglected to build a security architecture that scales itself to the organisation’s infrastructure resources.

This brings us to the final question: How to secure Hybrid Cloud?

While hybrid cloud environments are more complex, there are multiple hybrid cloud security solutions and practices organisations can put in place, to keep it secure.

1. Isolate Critical Infrastructure: Organisations store incredibly sensitive data on the cloud. However, access to this data needs to be isolated and restricted to a few key personnel, or those who specifically require it.
2. Securing Endpoints: Using the cloud infrastructure does not remove the need for endpoint security. Often, threats and attacks start at the endpoint level. Accordingly, enterprises and organisations need to implement proper endpoint security by choosing comprehensive security solutions that offer application whitelisting and browser exploit protection.
3. Encrypting data: Data – in transit and at rest – needs to be encrypted as a security measure. Organisations must also protect data, while it’s being used and processed by a cloud application. This will ensure that the data is protected for its entire lifecycle. While encryption methods vary according to service providers, organisations can choose the encryption method they prefer and then look for hosting providers who offer the same.
4. Back up Data: It is essential that organisations backup their data – both physically and virtually – in case an attack or system failure leads to a loss of data (either temporary or permanent). Backing up data for your website and other applications will ensure that the data is accessible at all times.  
5. Create a continuity and recovery plan: It’s vital that organisations create a backup plan to ensure that operations continue to run smoothly in a time of crisis (this could include power outages at data centres or disruption of services). A recovery plan could include image-based backups, which will create copies of computers or VMs, which can be used to recover or restore data.
6. Risk Assessment: One good practice for organisations to follow is to constantly update risk assessment and analysis practices. That way, organisations can review the cloud provider’s compliance status and security capabilities. It also allows organisations to look at their own internal development and orchestration tools. Organisations must also keep an eye on operation management, monitoring tools, security toolsand controls – both internally and in the public cloud. Vigilance like this allows security teams to maintain clarity and confidence in the controls that are currently in place and will give them time to modify them if required.
7. Choose a Reliable Web Hosting Provider: When choosing a Cloud Hosting provider for your website, organisations must look at the security capabilities. The service provider should be aware that security is a key concern and they should provide adequate security measures to keep your data safe. Good Cloud Hosting providers use the storage systems to ensure unshakeable stability. This ensures that you don’t have to worry about the loss of data due to hardware failures.

Ultimately, every hybrid cloud security issue has a corresponding solution. The trick is to identify specific problems early and then create a comprehensive security solution. If organisations do that, they will end up with a powerful hybrid cloud that functions smoothly, is easy to manage and remains secure.