Installing, configuring, and testing PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) remains one of the most popular server-side scripting languages designed for web development. It already supports some nice features, such as connecting to relational databases like MariaDB out-of-the-box which can be used to implement modern web applications very fast. While a current trend can be seen for larger enterprises to move away from PHP in favor of some newer technologies such as Node.js (server-side JavaScript), it is still the superior scripting language on the consumer market. Every hosting company in the world provides some kind of LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to run the PHP code. Also, a lot of very popular web applications are written in PHP, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, so it's fair enough to say that PHP represents a must-have feature for almost any Apache web server. Here in this recipe, we will show you how to get started with installing and running PHP in your Apache web server...