25 May 2017

My First Web Server

Today, I did something that I had always found confusing and scary – I configured my first web server! In doing so, I uncloaked the shrowd of mystery behind a bunch of concepts and terms I had heard people talking about for years, like:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Wordpress
• Apache
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP)

Inspiration

I just got my B.S., and I’m about to spend the year freelancing – that means I’m going to be expected to be a bit of a jack of all trades, having a working knowledge of a wide variety of things. Web development is one of the most sought after skills in the freelance world, and I wanted to figure out how to put the pieces together.

Background

I have enough understanding of CSS and HTML to make this site. I have used web frameworks like Jekyll, and hacked on other web frameworks like Ruby on Rails through my work on projects like The Jolly Advisor. In all of these cases, the infrastructure has already been prepared for me. I didn’t have to deploy or manage servers for The Jolly Advisor, and github manages all of the nitty-gritty for this website without me having to lift a finger. This project takes off the training wheels.

Goals

To orient myself to the ‘back end’ of making a website, I decided I would:

• Install Wordpress onto a server
• Make some basic changes to the default website
• Use AWS to do the above

By choosing Wordpress and AWS, I not only get at my core goal of comprehending the website building process, but I also have a chance to finally taste these two technologies I’m always hearing about.

Process

I picked out relevant sections from some tutorials to install wordpress, and configure my host.

I looked into some free domain names just to get a handle on that process, but I eventually gave up the search. I found a few that were free for 12 months, and required a fee after that, but none were completely free. I figured that I could worry about that as my last step.

That aside, I began by setting up AWS. I went to https://aws.amazon.com and signed up for a basic (read: free) account. I also redeemed some AWS credit that is provided for university students. I determined that to host a website, I wanted to create an EC2 instance, so I went through the steps of creating one.

Amazon provides a number of ‘images’ for their EC2 instances, which all come prebundled with different software and specs. Although there is a wordpress image available, for the sake of the aforementioned training wheels, I chose a vanilla Ubuntu image.

From there, it was some frantic googling and troubleshooting. I installed PHP and MariaDB (the P and M¹ of LAMP). I installed Apache, downloaded wordpress, and figured out where to drop the wordpress folder so apache would serve it. In this step, I consulted tutorials and googled a bunch to figure out what to do, where to put things, what data to enter where, and how to fix bugs when they arose.

Outcome

I did it! You can find the barely-modified wordpress template at the following catchy, easy to remember url: ec2-13-58-11-150.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com I would guess that it took me about 5, maybe 6 hours total to get that all set up. When making sure things were all working, I tried to install a new theme to the site, and was asked about my ftp credentials. Well, I didn’t set up any ftp client, so I didn’t know what to do! I burned a couple of hours trying to set up some virtual users with vsftp, and eventually gave up and found success by just doing a chmod 777 /var/www/html. I’m not proud of it, but it worked! And now I’ve learned something cool!