Setup a Load Balanced WordPress Website on AWS EC2. Learn how to setup your WordPress application to handle high traffic with auto-scaling capabilities on AWS with Elastic Load Balancing.
In this full guide you will install WordPress, configure your website to use AWS S3 for media files, create Amazon Machine Image, setup template, create a launch configuration, configure auto-scaling group to manage live traffic and setup RDS for your database.
Prerequisites
- A running EC2 Instance. Learn how to create an AWS EC2 instance. You can choose Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or latest.
- Assign an Elastic IP to your EC2 Instance.
- Setup Amazon RDS and connect it with EC2 Instance.
- Setup AWS Route 53 for your Domain name.
If you have all the above mentioned required prerequisites in place, you can proceed to setup Elastic Load Balancing.
Make sure you have added the security group of your EC2 instance to the security group of RDS for a successful connection from EC2 to RDS.
Initial Server Setup
SSH to the VM Instance and start by updating and upgrading the packages.
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Install Apache2 for WordPress
Install Apache2 using the following command.
sudo apt install apache2
This will install apache2 and all required dependencies.
Configure Firewall
Now you can set up Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) with Apache to allow public access on default web ports for HTTP , HTTPS and SSH
sudo ufw app list
You will see all listed applications.
Output
Available applications:
Apache
Apache Full
Apache Secure
OpenSSH
- Apache: This profile opens port
80(normal, unencrypted web traffic) - Apache Full: This profile opens both port
80(normal, unencrypted web traffic) and port443(TLS/SSL encrypted traffic) - Apache Secure: This profile opens only port
443(TLS/SSL encrypted traffic) - OpenSSH: This profile opens port
22for SSH access.
Now we will enable Apache Full.
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH sudo ufw allow 'Apache Full'
Enable UFW using the following command
sudo ufw enable
Install PHP 8 and Extensions
Add the ondrej/php which has PHP 8 package and other required PHP extensions.
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update
Once you have added the PPA you can install PHP 8.
sudo apt install php8.0 libapache2-mod-php8.0 php8.0-common php8.0-mysql php8.0-xml php8.0-xmlrpc php8.0-curl php8.0-gd php8.0-imagick php8.0-cli php8.0-dev php8.0-imap php8.0-mbstring php8.0-opcache php8.0-soap php8.0-zip php8.0-intl php8.0-bcmath unzip mariadb-client -y
Configure PHP 8
Now we configure PHP for Web Applications by changing some values in php.ini file.
For PHP 8 with Apache the php.ini location will be in following directory.
sudo nano /etc/php/8.0/apache2/php.ini
Hit F6 for search inside the editor and update the following values for better performance.
upload_max_filesize = 32M
post_max_size = 48M
memory_limit = 256M
max_execution_time = 600
max_input_vars = 3000
max_input_time = 1000
Once you have installed and confogured your PHP settings you need to restart your Apache for the changes to take effect.
sudo service apache2 restart
Configure Website Directories
Once you have installed PHP 8 and Apache you can proceed to setup directories.
Your website will be located in the home directory and have the following structure.
Replace yourdomainname with your original domain name without the extension.
/var/www/html/
-- yourdomainname
---- public
The public directory is your website’s root directory.
Now we create these directories and set correct permissions
You need to SSH into your VM Instance and run these commands
mkdir -p /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/yourdomainname sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/yourdomainname
Configure Virtual Hosts for WordPress
Create a new configuration file for your website in the sites-available directory.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/yourdomainname.conf
Copy and paste the following configuration, ensure that you change the server_name, error_log and root directives to match your domain name. Hit CTRL+X followed by Y to save the changes.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
ServerName www.yourdomainname.com
ServerAlias yourdomainname.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public
<Directory /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory /usr/share/phpmyadmin>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/yourdomainname.com_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/yourdomainname.com_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
To enable this newly created website configuration, symlink the file that you just created into the sites-enabled directory.
sudo a2ensite yourdomainname.conf
Check your configuration and restart Apache for the changes to take effect
sudo systemctl restart apache2
Install PhpMyAdmin (Optional)
Now you can install PhpMyAdmin which helps you to create database and assign a user to it in a user friendly way.
Download PhpMyAdmin and configure it using the following commands.
sudo wget -P /usr/share https://files.phpmyadmin.net/phpMyAdmin/5.1/phpMyAdmin-5.1-all-languages.zip sudo unzip /usr/share/phpMyAdmin-5.1-all-languages.zip -d /usr/share sudo mv /usr/share/phpMyAdmin-5.1-all-languages /usr/share/phpmyadmin sudo rm -f /usr/share/phpMyAdmin-5.1-all-languages.zip sudo mkdir /usr/share/phpmyadmin/tmp sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/share/phpmyadmin/tmp sudo cp /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.sample.inc.php /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
Edit the config.inc.php file
sudo nano /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
Add the following below the /* Authentication type */.
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';
/* Server parameters */
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'RDS_DATABASE_ENDPOINT';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPassword'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['verbose'] = 'Amazon RDS';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['port'] = '3306';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['socket'] = '';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['TempDir'] = '/usr/share/phpmyadmin/tmp';
Enter the blowfish secret.
$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'Some_Secret_Password_54_characters';
Hit CTRL+X followed by Y and ENTER to save and exit the file.
Create Database
Now you can login to your RDS instance with PhpMyAdmin (http://yourdomainname.com/phpmyadmin) using the master username and password you configured while creating the instance.
Create a new database and an user associated with that database.
Download WordPress
Now that our server software is configured, we can download and set up WordPress.
It is always recommended to get the latest version of WordPress from their website.
cd /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public
curl -LO https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
Once WordPress is downloaded you need to extract it using the following command.
sudo tar xzvf latest.tar.gz
Now, you can copy the entire contents of the directory into our document root.
sudo cp -a /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public/wordpress/. var/www/html/yourdomainname/public
Next cleanup your root directory by deleting the wordpress folder and the downloaded tar file.
sudo rm -r /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public/wordpress sudo rm -f /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public/latest.tar.gz
Setup correct permissions for the root folder. Don’t forget to replace the yourdomainname with your domain name you used.
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/yourdomainname
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/yourdomainname
Install WordPress
Now visit your website in the browser and select the language you would like to use and click continue.
You will be prompted to enter your database, user, password, and hostname.
Enter the database name you created using PhpMyAdmin and the user assigned with the database with the password. Finally, enter the RDS endpoint as the hostname.
Now you can run the installation.
Once the installation is complete we need to set the method that WordPress should use to write to the file system. Since we’ve given the web server permission to write where it needs to, we can explicitly set the file system method to “direct”. Failure to set this with our current settings would result in WordPress prompting for FTP credentials when we perform some actions like WordPress update, plugin updates, file upload, etc. This setting can be added below the database connection settings in the configuration file.
sudo nano /var/www/html/yourdomainname/public/wp-config.php
Find the line define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); and paste the following line below it.
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
Hit Ctrl+X and Y to save your configuration file.
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That’s for the part 1. Now you have created a Instance in EC2 and RDS and installed WordPress.
In the next part you can configure AWS S3, configure WordPress to use S3 for media library, request AWS managed SSL, create load balancer, auto scaling group and point your domain to Load balancer.
You can see the next part of this full tutorial here.
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