Hosting WordPress Application on an EC2 Instance – AWS

Arpit AggarwalMay 23rd, 2017Last Updated: May 23rd, 2017

2 63 2 minutes read

In this post, we will deploy WordPress Application on an EC2 Amazon Linux AMI t2.micro instance following below steps:

Step 1: Set up Amazon EC2 instance following set-up-amazon-ec2-instance.

Step 2: Launch an EC2 instance following ec2-launch-linux-instance.

Step 3: As creating a wordpress application is not a part of this post, I already created one and zipped it as wordpress-app.zip which we will securely copy from local machine to an EC2 instance home directory (/home/ec2-user) using ec2-user as follows:

scp -i /Users/ArpitAggarwal/arpitaggarwal-key-pair.pem /Users/ArpitAggarwal/wordpress-app.zip ec2-user@ec2-54-218-30-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/ec2-user

arpitaggarwal-key-pair.pem refers to private key file.
ec2-54-218-30-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com refers to Public DNS name of EC2 instance.

Step 4: Export wordpress-app database, as follows:

cd /applications/MAMP/library/bin
./mysqldump -u root -p**** wordpress > /Users/ArpitAggarwal/export-wordpress-data.sql

/applications/MAMP/library/bin refers to MAMP local database store.
./mysqldump referes to command to get mysqldump.

Step 5: Copy export-wordpress-data.sql we created from local machine directory to EC2 instance home (/home/ec2-user) directory:

scp -i /Users/ArpitAggarwal/arpitaggarwal-key-pair.pem /Users/ArpitAggarwal/export-wordpress-data.sql ec2-user@ec2-54-218-30-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/ec2-user

Step 6: Login to your EC2 instance with private key file and Public DNS name using ssh:

ssh -i /Users/ArpitAggarwal/arpitaggarwal-key-pair.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-218-30-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

Step 7: Change collation of your database by executing following commands in /home/ec2-user after login to an EC2 instance:

sed -i 's/utf8mb4/utf8/g' export-wordpress-data.sql
sed -i 's/utf8_unicode_ci/utf8_general_ci/g' export-wordpress-data.sql
sed -i 's/utf8_unicode_520_ci/utf8_general_ci/g' export-wordpress-data.sql

Step 8: Set up Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack on an EC2 CentOS 6 instance and set the processes to run automatically when the server boots, executing below commands:

sudo yum install httpd
sudo yum install mysql-server
sudo yum install php php-mysql
sudo service mysqld start
sudo chkconfig httpd on
sudo chkconfig mysqld on

Step 9: Set a root MySQL password same as you have provided in your wordpess-app, executing below command and choosing specific option for all the prompt:

1	`sudo` `/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation`

Step 10: Login to MySQL database on an EC2 instance and create DATABASE same as you have provided in your wordpess-app, for me it’s wordpress:

mysql -u root -p****
mysql> CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS wordpress;

Step 11: Import export-wordpress-data.sql to newly created database, as follows:

1	`mysql -uroot -p**** wordpress < export-wordpress-data.sql`

Step 12: Inflate wordpress-app.zip, Copy all the files to /var/www/html directory and create .htaccess file inside the same directory:

unzip wordpress-app.zip
sudo cp -R wordpress-app/* /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html
sudo touch .htaccess

Replace the content of .htaccess file with below:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Step 13: Edit httpd.conf placed in /etc/httpd/conf to set value of AllowOverride directive to All for the /var/www/html directory, as below:

<Directory "/var/www/html">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Step 13: Restart apache to reflect all of the changes we did:

1	`sudo` `service httpd restart`

Now, access the wordpress-app from your browser using Public DNS name or Public IP of your EC2 instance as: http://ec2-54-218-30-7.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/

Need to move WordPress site to a new Host?

It can be easily done by updating the option_value, post_content and guid of the application directly in the MySQL database executing below scripts:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://new-host/' WHERE option_name = 'home';
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://new-host/' WHERE option_name = 'siteurl';
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content,'http://old-host/','http://new-host/');
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE(guid,'http://old-host/','http://new-host/');