Verify / setup LAMP via SSH

Question

I am a PHP coder and have next to none experience in system administration. One of my clients has obtained a VPS from HostGator. The logins I was sent, take me to Parallels Infrastructure Manager, where I presumably, can start and stop containers. I guess a container in this context is a virtual server. Anyway, I looked for and couldn't find a cPanel, Plesk or anything familiar. I contacted support and asked how could I get a LAMP envo working on this account. They said as the account is not Level 3, I need to do everything through SSH.

I verified that Apache is running. But don't know where I should look for the document root. With that I would be able to check if I have PHP and MySQL running or not. If they're not, I don't know what should I do next. Your advice is appreciated.

P.S. The OS is CentOS.

Update
Ok, I found the document root which is /var/www/html as noted here. If you someone can provide guidance on how to setup PHP and MySQL via SSH, it would be great.

Answer 1

You should be able to find the DocumentRoot by looking in the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file. It would normally be /var/www/html.

You could check for php by running the command

rpm -qa | grep php

php-common-5.1.6-27.el5_5.3
php-5.1.6-27.el5_5.3
php-gd-5.1.6-27.el5_5.3
php-cli-5.1.6-27.el5_5.3

which will tell you what php packages are on your system

Similarly

rpm -qa | grep mysql 

mysql-5.0.77-4.el5_6.6
mysql-server-5.0.77-4.el5_6.6
mysql-devel-5.0.77-4.el5_6.6

Tells you what mysql packages are installed.

/sbin/service mysqld status

will tell you if the mysql daemon is running or not.

sudo /sbin/service mysqld start

will start it.

If you want to start mysqld with your system then use

/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 mysqld on