LEDE/OpenWRT — Setting Up A LAMP Stack

This guide will walk you through setting up a LAMP stack on your LEDE/OpenWRT device, allowing you to deploy web applications.

There are more advanced things you can do with this, but this guide will focus just on getting the very basics set up.

SSH to your LEDE/OpenWRT device

If you are using Windows then start PuTTY and click Session on the left side, select SSH from the options, and then enter in the IP Address of your LEDE/OpenWRT box into the Host Name field.

Once you’ve done this just click on Open to start up the SSH connection.

PuTTY

If you are connecting via terminal, then just SSH to your LEDE/OpenWRT device using the following command, where 192.168.1.1 is your LEDE/OpenWRT device’s IP address.

ssh root@192.168.1.1

Installing the webserver (lighttpd)

To start off with we are going to install lighttpd as our webserver.

Run the following commands:

opkg update
opkg install lighttpd lighttpd-mod-cgi

Once that is complete we need to make some changes to the config. So run the following:

vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Then change the following to enable cgi:

server.modules = ( 
     “mod_cgi”
)

Then we want to set our document root. In this example we are going to be using /srv/www/ on port 81 so change the following:

server.document-root = “/srv/www/”
server.port = 8000

Next run the following:

vi /etc/php.ini

And then add in the same document root:

doc_root = “/srv/www”

After doing this we need to create that directory, so run the following:

mkdir -p /srv/www

And finally we need to start the web server and set it to start on boot:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd start
/etc/init.d/lighttpd enable

Installing PHP

First off run the following commands to install the PHP packages:

opkg update
opkg install php5 php5-cgi
opkg install lighttpd-mod-cgi

Then we need to make some changes to our firewall config to allow access, so run the following:

vi /etc/config/firewall

And then add in the following:

config redirect
     option src wan
     option src_dport 80 
     option dest lan 
     option dest_ip 192.168.1.1 
     option dest_port 8000 
     option proto tcp 
config rule 
     option src wan 
     option dest_port 8000 
     option target ACCEPT 
     option proto tcp

Then restart the firewall by running the following:

/etc/init.d/firewall restart

Next we need to make some more changes to the lighttpd config, so run the following:

vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

And make the following changes:

cgi.assign = ( “.php” => “/usr/bin/php-cgi” )
index-file.names = ( “index.html”, “default.html”, “index.htm”, “default.htm”, “index.php” )

And finally restart lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Installing the database (MySQL)

To install the packages we need, run the following:

opkg update
opkg install libpthread libncurses libreadline mysql-server

Next we need to make changes to the MySQL config, so run the following:

vi /etc/my.cnf

We need to define the directory, so make the following changes:

datadir = "/srv/mysql"

Next run the following to initialise the system tables:

mysql_install_db --force

Finally run the following to start the MySQL process:

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

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