These are the five (four if you know which extension you want) components needed:

- libevent (requred library for memcached)

- memcached daemon

- libmemcached (required library for the php client)

- php extension (standard)

- php extension (PECL)

Now open your terminal and off we go:

Note: if you don’t want to install wget, you can alternatively use “curl -O”)

Installing libevent:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4.13-stable.tar.gz (if you’re brave, you can try the 2.0 beta)
$ tar zxvf libevent-1.4.13-stable.tar.gz
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Installing memcached:

$ wget http://memcached.googlecode.com/files/memcached-1.4.1.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf memcached-1.4.1.tar.gz
$ cd memcached-1.4.1
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make install
$ memcached -d -P pidfile -l 127.0.0.1 (this will start the memcached daemon)
$ ps aux | grep ‘memcached’ (this should confirm that memcached is running and how much memory is assigned to it)

Installing libmemcached:

$ wget http://launchpad.net/libmemcached/1.0/0.34/+download/libmemcached-0.34.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf libmemcached-0.34.tar.gz
$ cd libmemcached-0.34
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Installing PECL memcache extension:

$ cd /tmp
$ pecl download memcached
$ tar xzvf memcached-1.0.0.tgz
$ cd memcached-1.0.0
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Installing PHP memcache extension:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.2.4.tgz
$ tar -zxvf memcache-2.2.4.tgz
$ cd memcache-2.2.4
$ phpize &&
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Once all the steps are completed successfully, ensure that the extension directory is specified as the same as the output of the terminal after the extensions installed. Otherwise correct in php.ini.

Also add the line(s) to load the extension(s) in the php.ini file, in the extension section:

extension=memcached.so
extension=memcache.so

And finally restart apache:
$ sudo apachectl restart

And verify in phpinfo that memcache(d) is loaded and working.

1. If you don’t already have the mcrypt module (in /usr/lib), download the libmcrypt source code from sourceforge here. Then extract the downloaded file in a Terminal and move inside the created directory. (cd libmcrypt-2.5.8 in my case)

2. Execute the following lines in one command in your Terminal, if you have a 64bit version of Apache/PHP:

CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ \
CXXFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ \
./configure –disable-posix-threads

(for 32 bit versions: ./configure –disable-posix-threads)

2. In your Terminal, run:

make

3. If no errors, in your Terminal run:

sudo make install

4. Download the PHP source code from PHP’s website here. Extract in a Terminal and move into the extracted directory.

5. In your Terminal, run the following lines in one command:

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 \
CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ \
CXXFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/php5
–mandir=/usr/share/man
–infodir=/usr/share/info
–sysconfdir=/etc \
–with-config-file-path=/etc \
–with-zlib \
–with-zlib-dir=/usr \
–with-openssl \
–with-iconv=/usr \
–enable-exif \
–enable-ftp \
–enable-mbstring \
–enable-mbregex \
–with-mcrypt \
–enable-sockets \
–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
–with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
–with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
–with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs

6. Correct a bug in Makefile.

As a result of a bug in PHP 5.2.9 and 5.3.0, we’ll need to correct the file Makefile generated by the configure phase. Let’s add ‘-lresolv‘ at the end of the line that begins with ‘EXTRA_LIBS‘. Leave a space and add it like ” …   -lz -licucore -lm -lresolv to whatever is there already. Do not alter the exiting text, simply add it.

7. In your Terminal, run:

make

8. If no errors, run:

sudo make install

At this point, restart apache and check your configuration with phpinfo(). Look for mcrypt as it should appear as an enabled module.

1 – Download the installation image from MySQL website here. Then double-click to mount and open the disk image.

2 – Install MySQL Server by double clicking the package “mysql-5.1.*****.pkg” and follow the menu, accepting the default values, unless you want to change something and know exactly what you’re doing.

3 – Install MySQL Startup Item by double-clicking the package “MySQLStartupitem.pkg” and follow the menu.

4 – Install MySQL Preference Pane by double-clicking the file “MySQL.prefPane” and follow the menu. This item will simplify the management of your SQL Server. You can now use the “System Preferences” panel to start and stop the database server.

5 – Enable the php module in your apache config file. You might know that Snow Leopard already ships with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.3, but it needs a couple of tweaks to make it work smoothly. So, open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and search for “php5_module”. Remove the comment (#) in front of the line, save and close the file, then restart apache (sudo apachectl restart)

6 – Testing Apache/PHP. Let’s create an info file so we know what we got. Navigate to /Library/WebServer/Documents and create a file called phpinfo.php. Put the following line into the file, save and close. “<?php phpinfo(); ?>”. Now open your favorite browser and hit it (http://localhost/phpinfo.php). You should see a page like the one below, which shows you configuration details, modules enabled and other useful information.

7 – There is no php.ini out of the box (as you may have discovered by looking at the phpinfo page), but there is a sample file called “php.ini.default” which we’re going to use. Copy this file and save it as php.ini.

8 – Set the default time zone. As PHP 5.3 requires the timezone to be set, let’s do this inside php.ini, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore. You can always override it in your application’s bootstrap, if needed. Open /etc/php.ini and search for “[Date]“. Uncomment the line “date.timezone = ” and add your timezone. Check the php manual for acceptable values. (example: date.timezone = ‘America/Los Angeles’)

And that’s it. You should now have a fully functional LAMP stack with Apache, PHP and MySQL server.

But if we look under the hood of the actual Memcache application, and I’m not talking about the PHP or ASP extension, but rather the executable that’s running as a daemon under linux, for example, it is a rather simple database like application running in memory. Now there are two basic actions that need to be performed to use it, one is writing info into memcache, the other is reading it. In a typical scenario, there are many reads for one write, that’s the whole point, isn’t it. But what if we can isolate the reading from the server side scripts, and let a small high speed module do that for us.

That’s where Nginx and it’s Memcache Module comes in. We use PHP to fill up the cache and then let Nginx serve that content to the requesting client. According to lead architect Peter Gilg, this configuration is used at Mademan.com, a lifestyle site serving up to 1 million pageviews/day.

To be more specific, we’ll have nginx listen on port 80. If a request comes in, it checks memcache if the requested page is in memory and serves it directly to the client, or sends it to Apache (on port 88 for example) to produce the page. At the same time apache inserts the page into memcache, so it’s available to nginx for the next request. A sample configuration nginx script would look something like this:

server {
  location / {
    set $memcached_key $uri;
    memcached_pass     name:11211;
    default_type       text/html;
    error_page         404 = /fallback;
  }

  location = /fallback {
    proxy_pass backend;
  }
}

Additional Resources: Nginx Memcache Apache