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In addition to being able to install packages, there are some additional tips and 
considerations around searching for packages. After all, you can't install a package if 
you don't know what's available. We'll explore searching for packages in the next.
Searching for packages
Unfortunately, the naming conventions used for packages in Ubuntu Server aren't 
always obvious. Worse, package names are often very different from one distribution 
to another even for the same piece of software. While this book and other tutorials 
online will outline the exact steps needed to install software, if you're ever on your 
own, it really doesn't help much if you don't know the name of the package you 
want to install. In this section, I'll try to take some of the mystery out of searching for 
packages.
In the previous section, we went over searching for Snap packages, so I won't repeat 
that here. The APT suite of utilities also has a means of searching for packages as 
well, which is the 
apt search
 command. We can use the following command to 
search for packages, by providing a keyword:
apt search
The output from this command will show a list of packages that match your search 
criteria, with their names and descriptions. If, for example, you wanted to install 
the PHP plugin for Apache and you didn't already know the name of the associated 
package, the following would narrow it down:
apt search apache php
In the output, we will get a list of more than a handful of packages, but we can 
deduce from the package descriptions in the output that 
libapache2-mod-php
 is most 
likely the one we want. We can proceed to install it using 
apt
, as we would normally 
do. If we're not sure whether or not this is truly the package we want, we can view 
more information regarding this (or any other) package with the 
apt-cache show
 
command:
apt-cache show libapache2-mod-php

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Managing Software Packages