Preparing the system—basic prerequisites

In order to install and run Cacti, we need to make sure that all system prerequisites are met. Here we'll give an overview of the different components needed.

Web server

As most of Cacti is built as a web interface, a web server is needed. This can be Apache's httpd or Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) if installing on Windows, but in fact, any PHP-capable web server can be used to run the web interface. For optimal support, the use of Apache or IIS is suggested.

PHP

Cacti is built with the PHP programming language and therefore needs PHP to be installed on the system. Most Linux distributions already have a base PHP environment installed, but some might need additional packages for Cacti to function properly. In particular, the LDAP, SNMP, and MySQL extensions should be installed.

MySQL database

Cacti uses the freely available MySQL database engine as its database server and it is available on most operating systems. One should note that the database server does not need to be installed on the same host as Cacti. For best performance, MySQL version 5 should be used.

NET-SNMP package

The NET-SNMP package provides the SNMP binaries used by Cacti and supports SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, and SNMPv3.

The NET-SNMP package also provides the SNMP daemon for Linux.