Installing Memcache On Arch

This is a simple guide to get Memcached and the Memcache/Memcached module(s) for PHP installed on Arch Linux.

One of the things I love about Arch is it’s package manager. It’s always up-to-date and has a lot of packages including all the packages we need to get Memcached running. To install memcache, simply run

pacman -S memcached

Memcached is now installed! Let’s get it running.

memcached -d -m 512 -l 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 -u nobody

Let’s go over this command:

d: tells Memcached to run as a daemon
m: the memory (Memcached uses actual memory and not disk memory)
l: where to listen, here would only listen for local requests, if you want to allow other computers to access Memcached, specify the external IP
p: the port, default 11211
u: the user to run as

To make sure Memcached is running.

ps -eaf | grep memcached

To make sure that Memcached always starts on startup, add the command to /etc/rc.local.

Now that we have Memcached installed, we need to install the Memcache/Memcached modules for PHP installed. If you have PECL installed and configured, you can do it that way, or use pacman.

pacman -S php-memcache # or php-memcached for the Memcached module

Both of these commands will create a config file for the module in /etc/php/conf.d/. To enable the module you need to edit the config file (I used memcached, so edit /etc/php/conf.d/memcached.ini) and uncomment the line in there.

Finally run /etc/rc.d/httpd restart and there you go, you can start using Memcached in PHP.

Matt Loberg