problems with accents when running php

Good morning guys, I'm having trouble executing the code php in browser , in any browser, it does not recognize the accent. It was necessary to use the following line of code so that the accent was recognized: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8') ; But I wanted a somewhat more definitive solution, in which I would not have to always make use of this line. And detail I'm using a Linux Ubuntu distribution with LAMP server .