lamp

For the past few days, I've been diving deep into testing Drupal 8's experimental new BigPipe feature, which allows Drupal page requests for authenticated users to be streamed and loaded in stages—cached elements (usually the majority of a page) are loaded almost immediately, meaning the end user can interact with the main elements on the page very quickly, then other uncacheable elements are loaded in as Drupal is able to render them.

Here's a very quick demo of an extreme case, where a particular bit of content takes five seconds to load; BigPipe hugely improves the usability and perceived performance of the page by streaming the majority of the page content from cache immediately, then streaming the harder-to-generate parts as they become available (click to replay):

I have to set up a new LAMP server for different clients here and there, but not with enough frequency to warrant using a particular scripted solution or 'stack' from a particular hosting company. Plus, I like to have a portable solution that is flexible to the needs (and constraints) of a client's website.

Note on hosting providers: For hosting, I've used a very wide variety of hosts. I typically use and recommend Hot Drupal VPSes or Linode VPSes [affiliate link] running CentOS for a good LAMP server. Shared servers are only good for nonessential or low-traffic sites, but they are a bit cheaper and easier to use for simpler needs!

So, here's a typical step-by-step process for how I set up a CentOS 6 (similar process for CentOS 5) server for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), often for low-to-moderate Drupal sites (one or many):

I've seen a ton of iptables configurations on the Internet, and none of them really got to the heart of what I need to do for the majority of my LAMP-based web servers (hosted on Linode, HostGator, Hot Drupal, and elsewhere). For these servers, I just need a really simple set of rules that restricts all incoming traffic except for web (port 80/443 for http/https traffic), ssh (usually port 22), smtp (port 25), and icmp ping requests.

The script below (save it as 'firewall.bash', chmod u+x it to make it executable, and run it with $ sudo /path/to/firewall.bash, then test your server (access websites, log on to it from another Terminal session, ping it, etc., and make sure that's all working)):