✅ Day 20 of My Cloud Journey — Deploying WordPress on EC2 using LAMP/LEMP Stack 🧑‍💻🖥️

Today was a big leap forward in my cloud journey. I deployed a full WordPress site on AWS EC2, using both LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) and LEMP (Linux + NGINX + MySQL + PHP) stacks for comparison. This experience solidified my understanding of how dynamic websites operate in cloud environments.

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🧱 What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) used by over 40% of websites globally. It's PHP-based and requires a MySQL-compatible database to run.

Hosting WordPress on AWS EC2 gives you full control of your infrastructure, server tuning, and scalability — just like professional hosting companies.

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☁️ Infrastructure Overview

🛠️ Components Used:

• Amazon EC2 (Amazon Linux 2 or Ubuntu 22.04)

• Security Group for port 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP), and 3306 (MySQL internal only)

• Apache or NGINX (Web Server)

• PHP 7.x+ with necessary modules

• MariaDB (MySQL-compatible database)

• WordPress core files

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🧑‍💻 Step-by-Step Deployment

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🔹 1. Launch EC2 Instance

• AMI: Amazon Linux 2 or Ubuntu

• Instance Type: t2.micro (free-tier eligible)

• Subnet: Public Subnet (within a VPC)

• Assign a public IP

• Attach a Security Group with:

  • SSH (22) – My IP only

  • HTTP (80) – Anywhere

  • MySQL (3306) – Only internal (if using external DB)

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🔹 2. SSH Into the Instance

ssh -i "my-key.pem" ec2-user@<your-public-ip>

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🔹 3. Install Web Server + PHP

✅ For Apache (LAMP Stack)

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y httpd php php-mysqlnd php-fpm
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd

✅ For NGINX (LEMP Stack)

sudo yum install -y nginx php php-fpm php-mysqlnd
sudo systemctl start nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx

💡 Note: NGINX needs special config to pass .php files to PHP-FPM. You’ll update /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.

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🔹 4. Install and Configure MariaDB

sudo yum install -y mariadb105-server
sudo systemctl start mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb

🔐 Secure MySQL

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Set root password, remove test DB, disable remote root login, etc.

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🔹 5. Create WordPress Database

CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
CREATE USER 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'securepassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

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🔹 6. Download and Configure WordPress

sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
sudo cp -r wordpress/* /var/www/html/
sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/   # For Apache
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /usr/share/nginx/html/  # For NGINX

Copy sample config:

cd /var/www/html/
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Edit wp-config.php:

define( 'DB_NAME', 'wordpress' );
define( 'DB_USER', 'wpuser' );
define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'securepassword' );
define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );

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🔹 7. Final Steps

• Restart your web server:

    sudo systemctl restart httpd   # For Apache
    sudo systemctl restart nginx   # For NGINX
  

• Visit http://<your-ec2-public-ip>
  → You should see the WordPress setup wizard!

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🧠 LAMP vs LEMP: Key Differences

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📸 Diagram: WordPress Architecture on EC2

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🛡️ Best Practices Learned

• Use chown and file permissions to secure your web root

• Block direct access to wp-config.php

• Disable remote MySQL access unless required

• Store DB credentials securely (Secrets Manager is ideal)

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⚙️ Real-World Applications

• Host personal blogs, portfolios, or company websites

• Customize WordPress themes/plugins via SFTP or Git

• Scale out using RDS, S3 for media, and CloudFront CDN

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📅 What’s Next?

Day 21: I’ll practice MySQL backup and restore, create automated snapshots, and prep WordPress for long-term resilience.

🔜 Topics to Explore:

• Normalization & Foreign Keys

• mysqldump & mysqlimport

• S3 backups

• Connecting WordPress to external RDS instance

• Testing failover scenarios

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🧵 Wrap-Up

Deploying WordPress manually taught me:

• Cloud networking + compute integration

• Real web server configuration

• Secure DB handling

• Application + infrastructure blending in AWS

Stay tuned — we’re going full-stack, full-power from here! 💪