Running Wordpress on Amazon EC2

This article is about how to install Wordpress on Amazon EC2 with MySQL running on Amazon RDS.


Launch a EBS-backed AMI

In the ec2 console,  click launch select Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS 64-bit (AMI id = ami-3d4ff254).
Use t1.micro.
Set delete on termination to false for the root device.
Set termination behaviour to Stop.
Add port 22, 80, 443 for security group


Install Software

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql mysql-client libapache2-mod-php5

We are not going to install mysql-server, since we will be using RDS.


Use Amazon RDS as the database

If you want to set up your own MySQL database, you can do so. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use Amazon RDS because it takes care of scaling, replication and backups (to S3) without minimim effort.

Read Using MySQL on Amazon RDS to create a MySQL database.

After you created a database, note the database name, username, password, and endpoint address of the DB instance. The endpoint address will be like wordpress.a2ks0zoxdxq.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com.

You can ssh into your ec2 instance and run the mysql command to access the database.

mysql -h {endpoint_address} -P 3306 -u{username} -p{password}

Note that when I used a different syntax for the above mysql command, I kept on getting access denied error. Please use the syntax I specified above.


Download Wordpress

sudo mkdir /var/www
cd /var/www
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
rm latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress {name_of_your_blog}


Configure Wordpress

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

Change these:

define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

The DB_HOST will be the endpoint we specified above. Include the port :3306 as well.
Ex. wordpress.a2ks0zoxdxq.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:3306

Generate keys for the following:
https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

define('AUTH_KEY',         'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY',  'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',    'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY',        'put your unique phrase here');
define('AUTH_SALT',        'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT',   'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_SALT',       'put your unique phrase here');

Configure Apache

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
cp default wordpress
vi wordpress

Change DocumentRoot and Directory from /var/www/ to your blog's directory.

Change AllowOverride from none to all. (If you don't do this, you can't do pretty links in Wordpress.)

                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride all
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
       

Save the File.

a2dissite default
a2ensite wordpress

a2enmod rewrite

service apache2 reload

Launch the site

If you are starting a new Wordpress site, access the site from the browser, and following the on screen instruction and you are done.


Porting data from local MySQL to RDS MySQL

To export data:

mysqldump -u{username} -p{password} -h {host} {database} > backup.sql

To import data:

mysql -u{username} -p{password} -h {host} {database} < backup.sql