I have used WordPress as a blogging platform since 2007 on a couple of different hosting providers. Now that I am exploring the features of Amazon Web Services, I wanted to give WordPress a try on AWS.
Thanks to the Bitnami WordPress package that Amazon provides, setting up a WordPress blog on AWS is straightforward. There is a Quick Start document that extremely helpful, but there is one critical step missing from the instructions. More on that, below.
If you want to try out WordPress on AWS, I’ve put together my own instructions.
- Go to your AWS Management Console and click on Build using Virtual Servers.
- Select Linux/Unix as the platform.
- Select WordPress
- Scroll down to select your hosting plan. I went with the free for one month plan.
- Give your instance a name.
- Click on Create Instance.
- Go to your Lightsail home and wait for your WordPress instance to begin running.
- Follow Amazon’s Quick Start Guide to get access into your site.
- The one critical step that is missing from the Quick Start Guide is to configure your site for SSL encryption. Fortunately, there is documentation on how to do it. Follow that process after “Step 4: Map your domain name to your WordPress website” in the Quick Start Guide. I submitted an issue for the missing step on GitHub, so hopefully this omission will be fixed soon.
- Once you have your SSL certificate installed, you can finish up with steps 5 & 6 of the Quick Start Guide.
There are plenty of resources on the web that cover the steps to configure WordPress (such as this one), so I won’t go into that process here. If you need more AWS-specific instructions, there are useful tutorials in the Bitnami documentation.
The end result of this project was awsblog.michaelwlind.com. I consider it a development site at this point and will be duplicating my AWS-related blog entries there.
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