How To Install Memcached on Ubuntu 14.04

Memcached is a high-performance database system that can help supercharge your application. It's very fast as it does not write to the disk, but instead to system memory.

In this guide, I will explain how to install Memcached on an Ubuntu 14.04 server. This guide covers installing the PHP Memcached plugin too.

Step 1: Verifying prerequisites

There is some required software you need in order to be able to use Memcache:

• MySQL
• PHP

If you do not have these installed yet, install them with apt-get:

apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql php5

Step 2: Installing Memcache

Once you have MySQL and PHP installed, it's time to install Memcache. You can install Memcached by using apt-get again:

apt-get install memcached

After installing Memcache, you will need to install its PHP extension. This allows for communication between PHP and Memcache:

apt-get install php5-memcached

You may receive the following error:

E: Unable to locate package php5-memcached

If so, update your apt-get repository list:

apt-get update

After that's finished, try again.

Step 3: Editing configuration

The configuration file is located at:

/etc/memcached.conf

Open this file with your favorite text editor should you want to change the port Memcached runs on, the maximum memory, or the number of simultaneous connections.

• -p: port
• -m: memory
• -c: maximum allowed simultaneous connections

Once you have changed these settings, restart the memcached service:

service memcached restart

Congratulations! Memcached is installed on your Ubuntu 14.04 server. You can now configure your applications so that they will use the Memcached database.