How To Install memcached on Ubuntu 21.04

One-liner install command

For those in a hurry, here's a one-line installation command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt -y install memcached

But if you are interested in the detailed steps with descriptions, the following information is for you.

What is memcached and what are the ways to install it?

Before beginning this tutorial, you will need access to a server or computer running Ubuntu 21.04. This guide was written specifically with a server running Ubuntu 21.04 in mind, although it should also work on older, supported versions of the operating system.

Also, make sure you are running a regular, non-root user with sudo privileges configured on your server. When you have an account available, log in as your non-root user to begin.

There are several ways to install memcached on Ubuntu 21.04. You can use (links are clickable):

In the following sections, we will describe each method in detail. You can choose one of them or refer to the recommended one.

Install memcached using apt-get

First, update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt-get database, You can install memcached using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install memcached

Install memcached using apt

Because memcached is available in Ubuntu 21.04’s default repositories, it is possible to install it from these repositories using the apt packaging system.

To begin, update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, You can install memcached using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install memcached

Install memcached using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu 21.04. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating aptitude database, You can install memcached by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install memcached

How to upgrade (update) a single package memcached using apt-get?

First, you will need to update packages index. Run update command as usual:

sudo apt-get update

Next, to upgrade only the memcached, e.g. single package, you should use the following format with the apt-get command/apt command:

sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install memcached

Note that this command will not install any new packages! If you wish to install the package if it doesn't exist you may leave out --only-upgrade part.

sudo apt-get install memcached

How To Uninstall memcached from Ubuntu 21.04

To uninstall only the memcached package you can execute the following command:

sudo apt-get remove memcached

Uninstall memcached and all its dependencies

To uninstall memcached and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 21.04, you can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove memcached

Remove memcached with all configurations and data

To remove memcached configuration and data from your system you can run the following purge command:

sudo apt-get -y purge memcached

Remove memcached completely (configurations, data and all of its dependencies)

And lastly, you can run the next command to remove absolutely everything related to memcached package, e.g.: configurations, data and all of its dependencies. Just use this command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge memcached

Extra info and code examples

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss. memcached optimizes specific high-load serving applications that are designed to take advantage of its versatile no-locking memory access system. Clients are available in several different programming languages, to suit the needs of the specific application. Traditionally this has been used in mod_perl apps to avoid storing large chunks of data in Apache memory, and to share this burden across several machines.

Conclusion

You now have a full guide on how to install memcached using apt, apt-get and aptitude tools. Also, we showed how to update as a single package and different ways to uninstall the memcached from Ubuntu 21.04.

See also: