Create your MySQL database on Amazon AWS RDS
The main difference on this tutorial about EC2 WordPress setup is that we use a RDS database in stead of installing the database on the Ubuntu server. This saves considerable with CPU and RAM. When the EC2 VPS runs short of CPU and or memory, the first thing that suffers is the MySQL database. This again leads to that your WordPress goes down.
Use Sequel Pro, MySQL Workbench or Navicat create a empty database. The easiest way is to tunnel trough EC2 to RDS using SSH.
Download WordPress and create the root directory
Become admin on the server
sudo su
Create a directory where you will install WordPress.
mkdir /var/www/c.tbt.no
(replace c.tbt.no with your domain name)
Go to the home user area.
cd /home/ubuntu
Then dowload WordPress
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
Unzip the package after installing the unzip utility.
apt-get install unzip
Unzip wordpress
unzip latest.zip
Copy WordPress to the correct folder
cd wordpress
cp -r . /var/www/c.tbt.no
(replace c.tbt.no with your domain name)
Remove the installation files from the home area
cd ..
rm -r wordpress
rm latest.zip
Check to se that the files and folders really are removed:
ls -a
WordPress need permissions on the file system
Give permissions so that the WP updates will work.
chown -R www-data /var/www/c.tbt.no
Activate .htaccess
Sometimes you might need to activate .htaccess in the main apache config file. The config file is located here:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Search for the expression “Options Indexes FollowSymLinks“b. Do this by pressing “CTRL + W” and paste the expression into the Nano search field.
Find the following three lines:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Require all granted
Change the word “None” to “All”.
The correct version would look like this:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted
Then restart Apache
sudo service apache2 restart
Activate mod_rewrite
Sometimes you might need to activate mod_rewrite
a2enmod rewrite
– and then restart Apache
service apache2 restart
Add PHP-GD support to the Apache webserver
If you are running NextGenGallery you will ned this:
sudo apt-get install php7.0-gd
Add this to your php.ini file:
sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini
Add the following line:
extension=php_gd2.so
Run the WP installer to complete the EC2 WordPress setup
Go to your domain and run the installer.
Checking the Apache logs
If something is wrong then the log files could be an nice starting point.
nano /var/log/apache2/error.log
To delete the error log:
rm /var/log/apache2/error.log
Check the Apache log:
nano /var/log/apache2/access.log
Delete the Apache log:
rm /var/log/apache2/access.log
Restart Apache
service apache2 restart
Optional steps
Set up centralized administration using ManageWP. Set up SMTP sending from WordPress using Amazon SES and appropriate plugin. Buy a 3 year contract on your EC2 instance to get the best price.
Recomendations
We recommend using Thesis design framework from http://DIYthemes.com
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