Recently I had to deploy a number of new Centos 7 virtual private servers using VMware vSphere. This guide describes how to configure a LAMP setup on a new Centos 7 box.

Network configuration

This part of the guide is more for my own reference, however if you need to manually configure the network settings on your new VPS then here’s how I went about doing it:

1. Open the network configuration:vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens160
2. Replace the contents of the file with the below. You will likely need to adjust the IPADDR and GATEWAY properties.

   TYPE=Ethernet
   BOOTPROTO=none
   DEFROUTE=yes
   IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
   IPV6INIT=yes
   IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
   IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
   IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
   NAME=ens160
   UUID=5e108436-fe9a-4df2-bad4-482f271a26f4
   DEVICE=ens160
   ONBOOT=yes
   IPADDR=192.168.99.112
   PREFIX=24
   GATEWAY=192.168.99.254
   IPV6_PEERDNS=yes
   IPV6_PEERROUTES=yes
   IPV6_PRIVACY=no
   DNS1=8.8.8.8
   DNS2=8.8.4.4
   NN_CONTROLLED=no

3. Once saved, reboot the server to load the new network configuration.reboot

LAMP Setup

1. Install Apache.

   yum update && yum -y install httpd net-tools wget
   firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
   firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
   firewall-cmd --reload

2. Install MySQL.

   wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el-5.noarch.rpm
   rpm -vh mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm
   yum -y install mysql-server

   Add MySQL to the firewall:

   firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=mysql && firewall-cmd --reload

   Start the MySQL service:

   systemctl start mysqld

   Configure the MySQL server:

   mysql_secure_installation

3. Install PHP 5.5.
   Start by adding the EPL and remi repositories:

   rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
   rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

   Enable the PHP 5.5 remi repository by setting [remi] and [remi-php55] to 1:
   vim /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

   Now install PHP via the package manager – this will default to PHP 5.5 after the above change:

   yum install php

   Restart Apache, this will automagically load the new PHP installation:

   systemctl restart httpd.service

Installing Ioncube under SELinux

I also struggled to install Ioncube under the constraints of SELinux. Unwilling to turn off SELinux, here’s how I managed to install ioncube:yum install policycoreutils policycoreutils-devel checkpolicy

I then followed this guide: http://cuteshift.com/57/install-ioncube-loader-while-selinux-enabled/

After following the guide I was then able to install Ioncube using the provided wizard loader, found here: https://www.ioncube.com/loader-wizard/loader-wizard.zip