Start Deploying your PHP Applications to Production with Bitnami LAMP Production-Ready

LAMP is one of the most popular open source web service stacks used for developing dynamic websites and web applications. It is comprised of a set of well-known components that help developers create their applications quickly. LAMP is so prominent in the community because it provides a complete framework for creating high-performance web applications that saves you hours of coding.

Its components include a Linux operating system, an Apache HTTP Server, a MySQL relational database, and PHP as the programming language. When launching the Bitnami LAMP stack, you will get a ready-to-run package that includes all of the components above. 

LAMP is an essential component of every developer’s tool kit.  But what happens when you need to move your applications from development to production environments? This is where Bitnami can help. Bitnami has recently released the LAMP Production-Ready stack, which provides both high-availability and security for mission-critical use cases.  

In this blog post, you will learn about the main features of this production-ready stack and the most common use cases that this stack should be used for. 

Take the Performance and Security of Your PHP-based Applications to the Next Level

The LAMP Production-Ready architecture was designed to address your production needs. It adds an extra layer of security and ensures high-availability for your PHP applications even in the most traffic demanding environments.  The following are the features that you will benefit from when deploying this solution: 

• High-Availability architecture with two availability zones in the AWS regions to ensure that your cluster can continue working if a node (or a whole AWS zone) goes down.
• Replication model designed to distribute workloads across multiple application services.  
• Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is added to distribute HTTP and HTTPS requests across the application instances, ensuring the maximum performance with a high number of connections.
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)with public and private subnets. In both public and private subnets, an Auto Scaling Group is configured in each node to ensure dynamic, on-demand horizontal scaling. In addition to this, the EC2  instances that host the application servers are isolated in private subnets. Inbound traffic is allowed via Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)  while outbound traffic is managed through a NAT Gateway. This configuration increases the security of the cluster dramatically.
• Data and code (Aurora MySQL database and application servers) are separated in different instances improving the safety and access control. 
• Database cache performance is enhanced with an ElastiCache cluster, boosting the performance of the entire deployment. Also, Amazon Aurora provides auto-backup, geographic redundancy, and automatic replication, making it perfect for production environments. 

As you can see in the diagram below, the load balancer manages all user’s requests. It distributes the workload through the different application instances hosted in a private subnet. This configuration makes your application adaptable to the most demanding scenarios, even when a node is down, or if there are concurrent connections at any one time.

LAMP Production-Ready architecture diagram

When should you be using the Bitnami LAMP production-ready stack? 

As a developer, you probably have been in multiple situations where your applications required high-availability and automatic horizontal scaling. These are some examples of websites or applications that the Bitnami LAMP Production-Ready stack addresses perfectly: 

• PHP-based news or social sites: In this case, your application has high traffic and requires both high-availability, distributed workloads, and scalability. This is the typical scenario of WordPress and Drupal websites or social networks such as Diaspora. 
• PHP-based e-commerce, shopping, or ticketing web applications: This kind of applications usually require reliability, geographic redundancy, failover, and data backups. That happens, for example, to shops based on Magento, Prestashop, or Woocommerce. 
• Custom web application and REST/HTTP/SOAP API that needs an extra layer of security, access control, availability, and scalability. 

What’s next?

Try the LAMP Production-Ready Cloud Formation Template (CFT) directly from the AWS Marketplace to see how it can help you face the most critical and high-demanding environments. 

Once you click  “Launch” in the AWS Marketplace listing, you will be redirected to the CloudFormation Management Console. From there, you only need to configure some parameters of the template such as the network,  Linux bastion, and ElastiCache configuration. Then, click “Create” and wait for the template to deploy all the required resources in the AWS servers. In less than an hour, your LAMP Production-Ready stack will be available and ready to use.
Follow this detailed get-started guide to complete the process. Once you have the solution deployed, you will be able to install your custom application and run it directly into a production environment! 

Launch It Now!

Php 7.2 is now available on Bitnami

PHP, one of the most popular programming languages, has just released a new major version. And now, we are thrilled to announce that PHP 7.2 is available in the Bitnami catalogue!

We have released WAMP, LAMP, LAPP, MAMP, MAPP installers, virtual machines, and AWS cloud images to support the new version of PHP in all platforms.


As a developer, some changes that might interest you are:

• Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
• Counting of non-countable objects
• Object typehint
• HashContext as Object
• Argon2 in password hash
• Improve TLS constants to sane values
• Mcrypt extension removed
• New sodium extension

Visit the PHP 7 change-log web page for more information about this release.

If you are interested in deploying PHP 7.2 in the AWS cloud, you can do it following this link:

Launch PHP 7.2 stack now

New Development PHP Platform Stacks released with 5.6.0beta4

Development of PHP 5.6 keeps moving forward and this week a new beta version has been released. This version is just a bugfix release, and is intended to be the last release in the beta phase. You can find more information about the changes for PHP 5.6.0beta4 here.

We just released new versions of the PHP development installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images that ship the new PHP version.

Bitnami PHP development stacks ship Apache, MySQL, PHP in addition to other libraries and dependencies. You can click in the images to download the files.

In addition to that, we have also upgraded our PostgreSQL-based development environments: LAPP for Linux, MAPP for OS X and WAPP for Windows.

Try now if your application is ready for PHP 5.6! Check out Bitnami AMP/APP stacks and post your feedback in our community forums.

New AMP/APP stacks with latest PHP versions released

We are happy to announce that all of the Bitnami PHP-based development stacks have been updated to use the latest PHP versions:

• PHP 5.4.28
• PHP 5.5.12
• PHP 5.6.0beta2 

These versions fixed several issues, including a security issue CVE-2014-0185.

Because the Stacks are available as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud images, you can develop on a local machine natively or in a virtual environment and then deploy the application to Windows Azure or Amazon EC2 for testing and production.

The name of the Stack depends on the platform. It is called LAMP for Linux, MAMP for OS X and WAMP for Windows.

In addition to Apache, MySQL or PostgreSQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin, Bitnami AMP stacks are extensible and you can add applications on top of them. That way, all of the BitNami-packaged applications you want to run will share a single instance of Apache, MySQL and PHP, which will save space and improve performance. You can check the available modules for Bitnami WAMP, MAMP or LAMP.

Try now Bitnami PHP development stacks locally or in the Cloud and share your review with the Bitnami community. We are also open to new improvements and suggestions at http://community.bitnami.com

PHP 5.6alpha3 and MySQL 5.6 now available in Bitnami

PHP 5.6.0alpha3 was been released at the end of the last week and we are happy to announce that the Bitnami Library includes now support for this PHP version in our stacks: WAMP for Windows, MAMP for OS X and LAMP for Linux. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Bitnami Cloud Hosting, Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.


The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop or in the cloud. They include everything you need to start working on web applications and development frameworks. PHP 5.6 is still under testing, so there can be features that can be changed before the final 5.6.0 release.

WAMP stack installer

WAPP, MAPP and LAPP stacks are also available in case you prefer to use PostgreSQL database.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:
- PHP 5.6.0alpha3
- Apache 2.4.7
- MySQL 5.6.16 (PostgreSQL 9.3.2)
- phpMyAdmin 4.1.9

About PHP 5.6.0alpha3, the most important new features compared with the PHP 5.5 version are:

• phpdbg: PHP now includes an interactive debugger called phpdbg implemented as a SAPI module.

• Large file uploads: Files larger than 2 gigabytes in size are now accepted.

• gost-crypto hash algorithm: The gost-crypto hash algorithm has been added.

• SSL/TLS improvements: The OpenSSL extension has been extended to include support for extracting and verifying certificate fingerprints.

• Support for the Windows CA cert store for peer verification when no CA file is available

• OPCache module enabled by default

About MySQL 5.6, the most important features are:

• Performance: the optimizer has been improved, using Multi-Range Read and File Sort Optimization, as well as InnoDB (the default storage engine) to enhance performance of the MySQL database

• Scalability: as the database grows, tables can be partitioned to manage data more optimally, while keeping the convenience of a SQL interface for the full table. There are some new features that help with this.

• Replication: replication is a good feature for data integrity, availability and performance, and there are a lot of new improvements in this MySQL version which help to achieve this goal, such as replication checksums to ensure the integrity of the data being replicated to a slave.

PHP 5.6.0alpha3 info

Try it now if your application is ready to make the jump to light speed for PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.6!

New PHP Platform Stacks released with 5.5.7, 5.4.23 and 5.3.28

A PHP security vulnerability with OpenSSL was recently published. An attacker could use a malformed certificate to cause PHP to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.

If you are using Bitnami PHP Stack, it is recommended that you upgrade PHP to the new patched versions: 5.5.7, 5.4.23 or 5.3.28. We just released new versions of the PHP development installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images that ship the new PHP version.

Bitnami PHP development stacks ships Apache, MySQL, PHP in addition to other libraries and dependencies. You can click in the images to download the files.

There are also available for download PHP development versions with PostgreSQL database instead of MySQL.

PHP 5.5 stacks now available in BitNami

Yesterday the latest major version of PHP was released. We are happy to announce we now include support in our stacks for PHP 5.5.0: WAMP for Windows, MAMP for OS X and LAMP for Linux. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop/laptop or in the Cloud. They include everything you need to start working on web applications and development frameworks.


These new development stacks ship the following main components:

- PHP 5.5.0

- Apache 2.4.4

- MySQL 5.5.30

- phpMyAdmin 4.0.3

BitNami WAMP stack

This version of PHP ships the new Zend Optimizer+ extension, an opcache cachemodule designed to increase the performance. This previous post covered how to enable and configure this module.

In addition to that, we have also upgraded our PostgreSQL-based development environments: LAPP for Linux, MAPP for OS X and WAPP for Windows are available as native installers, virtual machine images and Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud images.

Try now if your application is ready for PHP 5.5!

PHP 5.5.0 info

PHP 5.5 now available in BitNami

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami PHP-based development stacks that includes PHP 5.5.0.RC1.  BitNami Stacks are self-contained environments that include everything you need to run your favorite web apps and development frameworks.

You can download a LAMP stack for Linux, a MAMP stack for OS X and a WAMP stack for Windows to develop PHP-based applications on your desktop, using your favorite operating system. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:

- PHP 5.5.0.RC1
- Apache 2.4.4
- MySQL 5.5.30
- phpMyAdmin 4.0.1

One of the new modules in PHP 5.5 is Zend Optimizer+, an opcode cache module. It is a component that is designed to increase the performance of PHP without altering the behavior of applications by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory.

It is similar to the APC module that it is already included in all BitNami AMP/APP stacks. There are some benchmarks that report Optimizer+ is faster than APC.

To enable this module it is necessary to add the following in the php.ini configuration file:

zend_extension=no-debug-non-zts-20121212/opcache.so
[opcache]
; Determines if Zend OPCache is enabled                                                                                                                                              
opcache.enable=1

Once you enable it, you can check the opcode cache settings and memory usage in the browser using the opcache-status script that you can download from https://github.com/rlerdorf/opcache-status

opcache-status page for PHP 5.5

We have also upgraded our PostgreSQL-based PHP development environments: LAPP, MAPP and WAPP stacks are available as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud images.

Try now if your application is ready for PHP 5.5!

New BitNami Development Stacks with PHP 5.4.14 released

We are happy to announce that all of the BitNami PHP-based development stacks have been updated to include PHP 5.4.14, Apache 2.4.4, MySQL 5.5.30 and PostgreSQL 9.2.4 support. BitNami stacks provide pre-configured, ready to run bundles for your favorite server applications and development environments.

You can download LAMP stack for Linux, MAMP stack for OS X and WAMP stack for Windows to develop PHP-based applications on your Desktop, using your favorite Operating System. There are also Ubuntu-based virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy on Azure or Amazon EC2 directly.

We also upgraded the PostgreSQL based stacks to the the latest stable version, PostgreSQL 9.2.4, that fixes a security vulnerability. You can download LAPP, MAPP and WAPP stacks as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud images for Azure and Amazon EC2.


If you develop with both databases MySQL and PostgreSQL, you can also install the PostgreSQL module on top of your current LAMP, WAMP or MAMP stack.

LAMP stack manager tool running on Linux

LAMP virtual machine

Get started with Laravel in the Amazon Cloud

We recently released BitNami LAMP WAMP and MAMP Stacks with Laravel 3.2.10, a popular development framework (the *AMP Stacks also bundle other frameworks like ZendFramework, CodeIgniter, Symfony or CakePHP). According to its website, Laravel is "A clean and classy framework for PHP web development. Freeing you from spaghetti code, Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax.". In this post, we will walk you step by step through how to start a project with Laravel in the Amazon Cloud using a BitNami LAMP Stack AMI.

First, you will need an Amazon account to access the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Console. Instructions on how to create your account can be found here (note that Amazon offers a free tier which provides you with a free micro instance for a year). Once you login to the AWS Console, go to the EC2 tab and launch a new Instance. You can locate the BitNami LAMP Stack image by searching in the Community AMIs tab for "lampstack-5.3.17-1", which is the latest version at the time of this writing.

Community AMIs in AWS console

Another option is to launch your AMI directly from the BitNami website (click on the button for either the LAMP or LAPP Stack towards the bottom of the page). You can select your preferred region (United States, Europe or Asia) from the drop down menu and the architecture (32 or 64 bits) and click on the appropriate link. Then, you can set different parameters from the AWS Console: availability zone, ssh key, the image type (micro, small, medium) and the security group. Once the machine is started, access it by typing the public DNS name in a browser. You should see something similar to the screenshot below.

LAMP welcome page

The next step involves connecting to the machine. You can download the private SSH key from your Amazon account. If you want to connect to the machine from Windows using the popular tool Putty, you will need to convert your private key to the .PPK format. Take a look at this tutorial if you are not sure how to perform this conversion.

On Linux or OS X, you can open a Terminal and run the following command:

$ ssh -i /path/to/your/private/key.pem bitnami@ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com

You will see a welcome message similar to:

BitNami welcome message

All of the required files for the Laravel framework are in the "/opt/bitnami" folder:

ctlscript.sh: It is the main script to start and stop the servers.
frameworks/laravel: The Laravel framework files.
apache2: The Apache server files.
php: The PHP language files.
mysql: The MySQL database files.

One of the advantages of this structure is that you can install the BitNami LAMP Stack on your desktop machine using either the BitNami installers for virtual appliances and develop your application locally, then migrate the full directory directly to the cloud when you are ready to put it into production.

You can edit the files online with a command line editor (nano, vim, emacs) but many people prefer to edit files with a graphical editor locally. Using an SFTP client like FileZilla, you can edit the files from your computer. If you need help, see our how-to for configuration instructions.

A simple way to start learning Laravel is via the Quick Tour that you can access via web. To enable it, you should uncomment the following line that you can find in the Apache configuration file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf:

Include "/opt/bitnami/frameworks/laravel/conf/laravel.conf"

and restart the Apache server:

$ ./ctlscript.sh restart apache

Laravel framework welcome page

That's all! You can configure the database settings in the "application/config/database.php" file. You can find more info about the Laravel configuration here.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About BitNami AMP Stacks

If you are already a BitNami user, you know that BitNami AMP / APP Stacks allow you to automatically set up an Apache, MySQL (or PostgreSQL) and PHP environment in minutes. While we strive to make all BitNami Stacks as intuitive to use as possible, we realize that good documentation is also important. We have just put the finishing touches on a new user guide for the BitNami AMP Stacks that summarizes everything you might want to know about the Stacks, including how to login to the components, how to stop and start the servers, how to install BitNami Modules on top of the Stacks and more. It also outlines the components included - did you know that BitNami AMP Stacks include the Zend Framework, Symphony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Smarty and a range of other components? Check out the new documentation for all of this information and more.

New BitNami Concrete5 Stack

We are happy to announce that a new BitNami Stack for concrete5 has been released!   concrete5  is an open source (MIT licensed) content management system that allows you to deploy web applications, websites, stores and forums and easily manage their content and their site structure. concrete5 is also a flexible framework written in Object Oriented PHP 5, and follows an extensible Model View Controller approach.

concrete5 excels at both ease of use and attention to detail. It provides a powerful inline editor and allows extensive customization of the look and feel of the site. You will be able to edit the frontend directly, add new blocks quickly and even drag and drop page elements on the fly.

Adding a new block

Editing content

Now you can easily install and configure your concrete5 application in your system with Native Stacks, run a Virtual Appliance or deploy on Amazon EC2 directly.

Updated PHP 5.4 and Apache 2.4 BitNami Stacks

We are happy to announce that we have updated our BitNami PHP platforms Stacks (LAMP, MAMP, WAMP, LAPP, MAPP and WAPP) to include the recently released PHP 5.4 and Apache 2.4.1. You can download the stacks as native installers for Linux, OS X or Windows, and as virtual machines. You will also find ready to deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Among the new features in Apache 2.4, you will find major improvements related to performance and memory consumption, as well as Dynamic Reverse Proxy configuration, improved Authentication/Authorization, FastCGI Proxy and a Small Object Caching API. This release puts Apache on par with alternative web servers like nginx for many common scenarios.

Some of the key new features of PHP 5.4 include: traits, a shortened array syntax, a built-in webserver for testing purposes, significant improvements in performance and memory footprint.

In addition to PHP and Apache, the following major components were updated:

phpMyAdmin 3.4.10.1
AWS SDK for PHP 1.5.1
Symfony 2.0.11

Because PHP 5.4 is still very new and not all apps support them, these PHP platform stacks do not support BitNami application modules at this point in time. The stacks are intended for quickly testing and experimenting with these new versions, so please do not run them in production unless you know exactly what you are getting into! If you have any questions or suggestions, we will be glad to help you in our Q&A forum.

Get started with CodeIgniter in the Amazon Cloud

We recently released BitNami LAMP WAMP and MAMP Stacks with CodeIgniter 2, a popular development framework (the *AMP Stacks also bundle other frameworks like ZendFramework, Symfony and CakePHP). In this post, we will walk you step by step through how to start a project with CodeIgniter in the Amazon Cloud using a BitNami LAMP Stack AMI

First, you will need an Amazon acount to access the AWS Console. You can find how to create your account here (note that they have a free tier which provides you with a free micro instance for a year). Once you login to the AWS Console, go to the EC2 tab and launch a new Instance. You can locate the BitNami LAMP Stack image by searching in the Community AMIs tab for "lampstack-5.3.8-2", which is the latest version at the time of this writing.

Another option is to launch directly from the BitNami website. You can select your preferred region (United States, Europe or Asia) and the architecture (32 or 64 bits) and click on the appropriate link. Then, you can set different parameters from the AWS Console: availability zone, ssh key, the image type (micro, small, medium) and the security group. Once the machine is started, access it by typing the public DNS name in a browser. You should see something similar to the screenshot below.

The next step involves connecting to the machine. You can download the private SSH key from your Amazon account. If you want to connect to the machine from Windows using the popular tool Putty, you will need to convert your private key to the .PPK format. Take a look at this tutorial if you are not sure how to perform this conversion.

On Linux or OS X, you can open a Terminal and run the following command:

$ ssh -i /path/to/your/private/key.pem bitnami@ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com

You will see a welcome message similar to:

All the required files are in the "/opt/bitnami" folder:

ctlscript.sh: It is the main script to start/stop the servers.
frameworks/codeigniter: The CodeIgniter framework files.
apache2: The Apache server files.
php: The PHP language files.
mysql: The MySQL database files.

You can edit the files online with a command line editor (nano, vim, emacs) but many people prefer to edit files with a graphical editor locally. Using an SFTP client like FileZilla, you can edit the files from your computer. If you need help, see our how-to for configuration instructions.

Edit the Apache configuration file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and uncomment the following line at the end of the file:

Include "/opt/bitnami/frameworks/codeigniter/conf/codeigniter.conf"

Restart the Apache server and visit the CodeIgniter welcome page at http://ec2-xx-xx-xx-amazonaws.com/codeigniter

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Success! You can now access the CodeIgniter user guide and create your own application in the Amazon cloud using this framework.

Updated BitNami PHP stacks

We are happy to announce new releases for our PHP platform Stacks: WAMP, LAMP, MAMP, WAPP, LAPP and MAPP Stacks. The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop/laptop or in the Cloud.

This release includes the following updated components:

• PHP 5.3.8
• Apache 2.2.19
• phpMyAdmin 3.3.4
• AWS SDK for PHP 1.4.1

Enjoy!

Released LAMP and LAPP Stacks for Linux 64 bits

BitNami LAMP Stacks (Apache, MySQL and PHP) and LAPP Stacks (Apache, PostgreSQL and PHP) have been just released for Linux 64 bits. Read more...