Host joomla on aws lightsail

Host joomla on Amazon Lightsail

What is Amazon Lightsail #

With Amazon Lightsail, you can deploy a virtual private server with just a few clicks using preconfigured images for your favorite Linux distribution, application, or dev stack. It is reliable, scalable and cost effective. Which makes it ideal for students, developers who want to experiment.

Lightsail offers the following in their plans

  • Static IP address
  • DNS management
  • Server monitoring
  • SSH terminal access (Linux/Unix)
  • Intuitive management console
  • Secure key management
  • Cost management

Alright, lets check the basic requirements,

  • You need a domain(that’s obvious isn’t it). If you need to buy a new domain name, you can register using a domain provider.
  • You need an account in Amazon Web Services(AWS) or the Amazon Lightsail (You can use an existing Amazon account). If you don’t have an account, please signup.

Okay, assuming you have a domain name and an account with amazon Lightsail lets get started.

  1. Login to you account and you will be greeted by this awesome robot. Click lets get started.

    lightsail

  2. Once you click “Let’s get started”, you need to select the location where you want to host your server. Choose the location closest to you.

    instance location

  3. Once you have selected the location, select the operating system. In our case, we are choosing Linux/Unix as our operating system.

    instance image

Now, there are 3 ways we can create a server to host the joomla website.

  • Choose the Joomla instance image which contains preinstalled LAMP stack and joomla. This is easiest way to create a Joomla webserver. However, we are not choosing this option.
  • Install a LAMP stack and install joomla manually on top of LAMP stack. This is the option wchoose in step 3 when selecting the platform as LAMP server..
  • Create a unix/linux server and install PHP, mysql database, Apache which is by far the most time consuming and not easy.

We will set up server using 2nd option. What? are you crazy? why not the easiest option. Well, I will list my reasons and you can decide

  • The joomla stack listed is fairly outdated.
  • You can update the joomla version but not the other dependencies like PHP.
  • You cannot update PHP alone, as the stack is self contained which means, the entire stack needs to be updated.
  • So, you have to update the entire stack and that’s possible only when the new image is available in the lightsail instances.
  • It is painful to keep all the dependencies updated.

  1. Select the LAMP stack and choose the plan. instance plan

  2. Name your instance and click create instance and you are done creating the LAMP stack. instance name

    Next we have to install Joomla.

    The instance will take few seconds to start. Once it is up, you should see the instance running

    instance started

  3. Click the instance and it should give you the following page. instance ready

  4. Click “Connect using SSH”. This should popup a window (Unix command line interface) using which you can access the Unix server.

    unix ssh

  5. Run the following commands to get the Joomla file and install. Don’t forget to change the Joomla version in “wget’ command. Once the installation starts, you have to specify the installation directory to “/opt/bitnami” and set your preferred password.

    
 sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh stop
 cd
 wget "https://bitnami.com/redirect/to/289923/bitnami-joomla-3.8.12-0-linux-x64-installer.run"
 chmod +x ./bitnami-joomla-3.8.12-0-linux-x64-installer.run
 sudo ./bitnami-joomla-3.8.12-0-linux-x64-installer.run --disable_glibcxx_version_check 1
 sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh start

  6. Once you have successfully installed Joomla, you need to get the administrator credentials by using the following command. Username is either “user” or “bitnami”.

    
 cat bitnami_application_password

Once you have the username and password, open a new browser tab and type in the public IP assigned to you and press enter to see the default joomla page.

  1. To point your web domain to this IP or instance, login to your domain registrar (godaddy, namecheap, etc) and point the “A” record to this IP and you are all set.

    get password

Congratulations!! you have your Joomla website on lightsail.

I hope this article helped you. If you have any queries, please feel free to comment or contact me here for any help.