Setting Up WordPress on Amazon Web Service in 5 minutes

Step 1: Create an Amazon Web Services (Hereafter AWS)  Account

First things first: Create your AWS account. Provide a credit card and a phone number and AWS will call you to verify your details. Amazon offers a Free Usage Tier, which is greatly beneficial to explore AWS services and even host real apps without being hugely charged. Check the details here.

Step 2: Prerequisites to launch EC2 instance:

Create new IAM User and add it to administrator group or use default administrator role created while sign up. Create Keypair and download to login to instance using CLI. Create new VPC or use default VPC. Create Security group to allow inbound and outbound traffic and attach security group to default VPC/Self made VPC. ( For an instance you can allow “all traffic”.)

PS: You will need to allow SSH, HTTP, MySQL traffic to communicate with instance.

Step 3: Create an Instance

What type of EC2 instance should you use? 

Well, Choosing right instance depends upon many factor such as traffic, usage etc, which require detailed analysis for your usage, product and services. Right now, for initial WordPress installation use t2-Micro instance (Free tier eligible) However, t2-Micro instance doesn’t work properly with heavy traffic websites.

To create a new instance, access the AWS Management Console and click the EC2 tab:

• Choose an AMI in the classic instance wizard: chose the Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI.

• Now review your configuration and launch t2-micro EC2 Instance.

• Instance details: Select the Instance Type you want to use. I chose micro (t2.micro)

• Choose default VPC and Subnets.
• Enable Auto Assign public IP
• Choose IAM role ( If not created, select none)

• Add storage for your instance : for t2-micro instance you can choose default 8GiB storage.

• Assign previously created security group or create new security group and attach it to EC2 Instance.

• Choose Existing Key pair or Create New key pair

Step 3: SSH into your Instance

Once your instance is up and running, Login to Instance using SSH. Grab public IP address of EC2 Instance and SSH to it.

Use that address (and a path to your .pem file) to ssh into your instance:

Command: 
ssh ec2-user@ec2-184-72-78-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com -i ~/wpaws.pem

If you get a message about your .pem file permissions being too open, chmod your .pem file as follows:

chmod 600 ~/wpaws.pem

Many of the shell commands below require root access. To avoid having to prefix these commands with sudo, let’s just switch user once and for all:

 sudo su

Step 4: Install the Apache Web Server

To install and update Apache Web Server,:

yum install httpd

Start the Apache Web Server:

service httpd start

To test your Web Server, open a browser and access your web site: ec2-184-72-78-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com (Use your actual public DNS name). You should see a standard Amazon place holder page.

Step 5: Install PHP

To install PHP, type:

yum install php php-mysql

Restart the Apache Web Server:

service httpd restart

Create a page to test your PHP installation:

cd /var/www/html
 vi test.php

. Type i to start the insert mode

 . Type  <?php phpinfo() ?>

. Type :wq to write the file and quit vi

Open a browser and access test.php to test your PHP installation: ec2-184-72-78-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com (Use your actual public DNS name).

Step 6: Install MySQL

To install MySQL, type:

yum install mysql-server

Start MySQL:

service mysqld start

Create your “blog” database:

mysqladmin -uroot create blog

Secure your database:

mysql_secure_Installation

Answer the wizard questions as follows:

. Enter current password for root: Press return for none

. Change Root Password: Y

. New Password: Enter your new password

. Remove anonymous user: Y

. Disallow root login remotely: Y

. Remove test database and access to it: Y

. Reload privilege tables now: Y

Step 7: Install WordPress

To install WordPress, type:

cd /var/www/html
 wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
 tar -xzvf latest.tar.gzcd
 

This will uncompress WordPress in its own “wordpress” directory. I like having WordPress in a separate directory, but would rather rename it to “blog”:

mv wordpress wordpress

Create the WordPress wp-config.php file:

cd blog
 mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
 vi wp-config.php

. Type i to start insert mode.

. Modify the database connection parameters as follows:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
 define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’);
 define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘YOUR_PASSWORD’);
 define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

. Type :wq to write the file and quit vi

Open a Browser and access your blog: ec2-184-72-78-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com (Use your actual public DNS name). This should trigger the WordPress configuration process.

Step 8: Map IP Address and Domain Name

To use your blog in production, you will have to:

. Associate an IP address to your instance

. Map your domain name to that IP address

. Change and Update CNAME records and even MX records for mailing.

To associate an IP address to your instance:

. In the AWS Management Console, click Elastic IPs (left navigation bar)

. Click Allocate New Address, and confirm by clicking the “Yes, Allocate” button