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It's generally known that it's a horrible idea to use these one-click LAMP stack installers for anything but local development. That said, with surprising regularity, we seem to get questions from people that are trying to use these in production. The vast majority of these users fall into the category where they should be migrated to SU, but often times that doesn't happen.

It would be quite nice if we could come to a concensus as to how to handle these questions.

My thoughts are thus:

  1. If it's obvious that the Q is better suited for SU, then migrate it there.
  2. If there's a chance that it's being used in a professional capacity, but they're trying to use it for production, then close it as a dupe of the canonical "Why *AMPP shouldn't be used in production" question.
  3. If it doesn't match 1 or 2, then answer the question as appropriate.
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  • Does using Debian's tasksel fall into this category?
    – Andrew
    Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 6:31
  • 3
    No, certainly not. tasksel merely selects the appropriate packages out of Debian's repo and installs them for you. This is far superior to the *AMP one-click installer packages.
    – EEAA
    Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 7:05
  • 1
    sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
    – TRiG
    Commented Jul 26, 2015 at 0:10

2 Answers 2

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I like the second option, as long as I don't have to write an answer to the canonical question (there's no way any answer I wrote would pass the "be polite" test...) I'd certainly participate in a V2Cathon (even of piles and piles of old questions).

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While I strongly agree with both the question and Womble's answer there's an annoying part of my mind that wants to warn against us getting too dictatorial in regard to what we will accept as professional behavior when it comes to things like this. I personally don't believe that AMP should be used for a production environment but I also don't know everybody's circumstances.

Playing the Devil's advocate: I can however imagine a situation where an admin with no prior experience in the area is required to set up a web server and chooses one of these prepackaged methods because he/she believes it's the quickest and simplest way to get started while, rightly or wrongly, believing that issues like basic security have already been "built-in".

Is it our place to reject the question out of hand simply because it's not the way we would do things? Is it really so severely unprofessional? Once we go down that road, where will it take us?

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  • 3
    Wouldn't it be best to point that hypothetical new admin at something that described exactly why *AMP is a bad idea, and what a better option is, so that they can fix the problem before they become deeply embedded in it's tentacles?
    – womble Mod
    Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 20:11
  • 1
    @womble, yes it would and that would be constructive. Simply closing the question or sending it to SU wouldn't be at all helpful.
    – John Gardeniers
    Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 22:22
  • Aha, I think I misunderstood your stance.
    – womble Mod
    Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 5:47
  • 5
    +1 for not wanting to be too restrictive on what's "professional" in someone's unknown production environment. As awful an idea as it is, when project or task constraints are "whatever equipment you can beg borrow or steal, $0, and completed by yesterday," the proper professional behavior can be shoving a MAMP stack into production, as dirty as I feel saying so. And in shops with shoestring budgets for hardware and software, I've had great results shoving a LAMP stack onto an old desktop and reminding the boss/client it's an awful idea that will hurt later, but you insisted, so, there it is.
    – HopelessN00b
    Commented Sep 14, 2012 at 2:55
  • 2
    I work for nonprofits, and most times you have what you have. I've made several long-term, medium-traffic intranet systems on WAMP, by necessity. Best practice is great, and I can talk all day about the virtues of hosting on a *nix platform, but at the end of the day life often falls short of best practice. No lives will be lost if I deploy on WAMP.
    – Chris
    Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 19:49

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