CHAPTER 24

Common Web Server Stacks

IN THIS CHAPTER

LAMP

LEMP

MEAN

References

A web server stack is a set of software installed and configured to work

together to serve content over a network. There are many stacks of software
that are common enough to be referred to using acronyms. This chapter
describes some of the most popular. Before diving deeply into each of the
related technologies, this chapter introduces some of the most popular types
of web server stacks in use today.

All of the stacks in this chapter can be assembled and run on Ubuntu or any
Linux distribution and are common enough to be worth knowing something
about. The pieces being used to assemble the stacks described in this chapter
can often be replaced with different software that serves the same purpose, as
is illustrated in the discussion of the LAMP stack.

There is a lot to think about, regardless of which stack you choose. This
chapter is intended to give a high-level overview of a few popular options.
Large books have been written and are available for the various stacks, for
each of the underlying layers in the stacks, and so on. The goal of this chapter
is to help you begin to think about how to accomplish a much larger goal, not
to outline all the necessary steps and configurations.

LAMP

LAMP was one of the first stacks to become popular. It is composed of Linux,
the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and either PHP, Python, or Perl.