Installing a Webserver on AWS EC2

I’ve recently lantean.co to AWS EC2. Amazon offers a free EC2 instance for a year…. so i decided to give it a shot.

The main reason i had to migrate to a self managed hosting is simple. Shared Hostings don’t allow you to fine tune several settings, such as the PHP Memory, and you might event not be able to login using ssh. What did i need to do?. It’s simple… let’s see…

Setting up the Environment

1. Signup at Amazon Web Services. You’ll need a credit card.
2. Create a new EC2 instance. Select ‘Micro’ as the type.
3. Select the Amazon AMI. (I don’t trust 3rd party images!).
4. Follow the wizard, and generate the SSH private / public keys.
5. Setup the firewall, so only IP’s in your C class can connect through SSH, and everyone can hit the port 80.
6. Connect to your box!
   ssh -i certificate.pem ec2-user@[elastic-ip]
7. Setup a password for your root user
   su passwd
8. Install Apache
   yum install httpd
   service httpd start
   chkconfig httpd on
9. Install PHP
   yum instlal php php-mysql
10. Install mySQL
    yum install mysql-server
    service mysqld start
    chkconfig mysqld on
11. Secure mySQL
    mysql_secure_installation
12. Install APC
    yum install php-pecl-alc

Setting up Apache

Assuming we’re not gonna host just a single website, but a couple of them… we’re gonna need to setup Virtual Hosts. With VirtualHosts you can serve as many domains as you need, using a single apache installation. Steps!

1. Log into your instance and type… (replace domain.com with your own domain):
   su
   mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/public_html
   mkdir /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf
   nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf/httpd.conf
   Add the following lines:
   
         <VirtualHost *:80>
             ServerAdmin your-mail@domain.com
             DocumentRoot /var/www/domain.com/public_html
             ServerName www.domain.com
             ServerAlias *.domain.com
             ErrorLog /var/www/domain.com/error.log
             CustomLog /var/www/domain.com/requests.log combined
         </VirtualHost>
2. Enable htaccess in your virtual hosts:
   nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
   AllowOverride All
3. Enable logrotate:
   nano /etc/logrotate.conf
   Add the following lines:
   
      /var/log/httpd/*log
      /var/www/*/*log
      {
          size 5M
          missingok
          notifempty
          sharedscripts
          delaycompress
          postrotate
         /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true
          endscript
      }

Setting up mySQL

At last!. Let’s see how to create a mySQL database, add a new user, and how to import your mySQL dump, using nothing but bash.

1. Create a new database and a new user
   mysql -u root -p     << You will be asked for your mySQL root-password!
   create database wordpress;
   create user 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
   grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost;
   flush privileges;
2. Import a database dump
   mysql -p -u wordpress wordpress < database_dump.sql

 
I hope you found this short guide helpful!