After logging into AWS and launching the Lightsail service, it is necessary to create an instance. The instance for WordPress is based on the Linux Debian operating system packaged by Bitnami. Lightsail applications run standalone from AWS at large though can be integrated with it. When an instance is created, with the Route 53 service an hosted zone is created for the domain. It is barebones containing only the SOA and NS records. If it’s necessary to migrate an existing website into AWS/Lighstail, you must add the name service records for MX, CNAME, TXT, etc. This can be done by exporting the existing zone and then importing them into Route 53 but not adding the SOA and NS records (optional, depends on if you will still need them.)
Accessing the database directly is not allowed. To use the phpmyadmin included in Lightsail, you must create an SSH tunnel. Bitnami documents the procedure on this page and specifically with this video.
In order to access SFTP with a program like Filezilla on AWS, follow the documentation here.
If you add files to WordPress, it is likely that there will be permissions issues. You will see in the admin dashboard messages about not being to access certain files or folders. You can change the permission by connecting to the instance using SSH. This procedure is shown as a prerequisite for opening phpmyadmin. After successfully connecting, you can change ownership of the problematic files and folders with the following command which must be updated for the target machine.
sudo chown -R daemon:daemon uploads
sudo chown -R daemon:daemon application/config
sudo chown -R daemon:daemon /opt/bitnami/apache/htdocs/temp
In order for the domain name to resolve on the internet, you will need to update the Hosted Zone. In the hosted zone, add an A record pointing to the IP address of the Lightsail instance. This will work but will not support https (that is there is no SSL certificate). AWS documents how to add an SSL certificate to Lightsail. However, Bitnami has a better solution for this.
Recently I needed to create transcriptions for a number of videos. I decided to use Amazon Transcribe to make it faster for me than typing. I used ffmpeg and S3 to lighten the load.
— 1. separate audio from the video file
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 2 output.wav
— 2. upload audio to S3 bucket
aws s3 cp output.wav s3://transcribe-for-canvas
— 3. extract the text from the audio through transcription
aws transcribe start-transcription-job –transcription-job-name canvascaptions –media MediaFileUri=s3://transcribe-for-canvas/output.wav –output-bucket-name transcribe-for-canvas –subtitles Formats=srt –language-code en-US –region us-east-1
— 4. check on the transcription progress
aws transcribe get-transcription-job –transcription-job-name canvascaptions
— 5. download the transcription files
aws s3 cp s3://transcribe-for-canvas –recursive
–Combine video and audio
ffmpeg -i ‘video.mp4’ -i ‘audio.m4a’ -c copy -map 0:0 -map 1:0 output.mp4
–Extract audio from video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 44100 -ac 2 output.wav
This is a list of packages available in the Amazon Linux 2023 as of today on Elastic Beanstalk.
postgresql-odbc.x86_64
13.01.0000-5.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql-odbc-tests.x86_64
13.01.0000-5.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-contrib.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-docs.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-llvmjit.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-plperl.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-plpython3.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-pltcl.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-private-devel.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-server-devel.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-static.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-test.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-test-rpm-macros.noarch
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-upgrade.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
postgresql15-upgrade-devel.x86_64
15.5-1.amzn2023.0.1
This is useful when launching an instance and knowing which packages are available in the repository.
dnf list available postg*
This is a mess. I will edit it later
This is the command history to build a Lambda Layer in Python. I had to add a C compiler, Compile Python 3.9 with a specific requests module, and then upload to S3 and Add the Layer to Lambda function before I could use it but after all that, it worked.
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-2-31-49 packaging]$ history 100
============================================================================
1 sudo yum -y update
2 python -V
3 wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.16/Python-3.9.16.tgz
4 tar xvf Python-3.9.16.tgz
5 cd Python-3.9.16/
6 ./configure –enable-optimizations
7 sudo make altinstall
8 ls
9 ./configure –enable-optimizations
10 sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
11 gcc –version
12 ./configure –enable-optimizations
13 sudo make altinstall
14 python -V
15 ls /usr/local/bin/
16 ls /usr/local/bin/python3.9
17 /usr/local/bin/python3.9 -V
18 alias python=’/usr/local/bin/python3.9′
19 python -V
20 gcc –version
21 pwd
22 cd ..
23 cd ~
24 ls
25 mkdir packaging
26 cd packaging/
27 python3.9 -m venv layer_package
28 source layer_package/bin/activate
29 pip install requests
30 pip install –trusted-host pypi.org –trusted-host pypi.python.org –trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org requests
31 pip config set global.trusted-host “pypi.org files.pythonhosted.org pypi.python.org” –trusted-host=pypi.python.org –trusted-host=pypi.org –trusted-host=files.pythonhosted.org
32 pip install requests
33 pip install –trusted-host pypi.python.org linkchecker
34 pip -V
35 pip install –trusted-host pypi.python.org requests
36 pip install –trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org –trusted-host pypi.org –trusted-host pypi.python.org requests
37 yum install openssl-devel
38 sudo yum install openssl-devel
39 cd /usr/src
40 deactivate
41 sudo yum install openssl-devel
42 ls
43 cd ~
44 ls
45 cd Python-3.9.16
46 ls
47 ./configure –enable-optimizations
48 ls /usr/local/bin/
49 ls /usr/local/bin/python3.9
50 rm -r /usr/local/bin/python3.9
51 sudo rm -r /usr/local/bin/python3.9
52 ls /usr/local/bin/python3.9
53 sudo make altinstall
54 python -V
55 cd ~/packaging/
56 python3.9 -m venv layer_package
57 source layer_package/bin/activate
58 pip install requests
59 deactivate
60 ls
61 mkdir python
62 cp -r layer_package/lib/python3.9/site-packages/* python/
63 zip -r lambda-layer-requests-python3.9-x86_64.zip python
64 ls
65 aws s3 ls
66 aws s3 mb csa-va-lambda-layers-python-requests
67 aws s3 mb s3://csa-va-lambda-layers-python-requests
68 aws s3 ls
69 ls
70 aws s3 cp lambda-layer-requests-python3.9-x86_64.zip s3://csa-va-lambda-layers-python-requests
71 ls
72 ls python/
73 ls python/urllib3
74 sudo rm -r python/urllib3
75 ls python/requests
76 sudo rm -r python/requests
77 pip install requests==2.28.2 -t ./python –no-user
78 pip3 install requests==2.28.2 -t ./python –no-user
79 ls python/
80 zip -r lambda-layer-requests-python3.9-x86_64-2.zip python
81 ls
82 aws s3 cp lambda-layer-requests-python3.9-x86_64-2.zip s3://csa-va-lambda-layers-python-requests
Recently, I had the need to compile Python 3.9 on AWS CloudShell which was necessary to create a Lambda Layer for the requests module.
This required add a C compiler to CloudShell. The steps are:
Step 1: Update packages.
sudo yum update
Step 2: Install GCC
sudo yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
Step 3: Check version
gcc –version
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-2-31-49]$ gcc –version
gcc (GCC) 7.3.1 20180712 (Red Hat 7.3.1-15)
Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Visit the Heroku Developer center at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-cli for guidance on their CLI installation.
1. Review the AWS CLI environment
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ aws –version
aws-cli/2.13.4 Python/3.11.4 Linux/4.14.255-314-253.539.amzn2.x86_64 exec-env/CloudShell exe/x86_64.amzn.2 prompt/off
2. Download the heroku linux tar ball
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ wget https://cli-assets.heroku.com/heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz
–2023-08-07 05:11:58– https://cli-assets.heroku.com/heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz
Resolving cli-assets.heroku.com (cli-assets.heroku.com)… 18.160.46.40, 18.160.46.26, 18.160.46.47, …
Connecting to cli-assets.heroku.com (cli-assets.heroku.com)|18.160.46.40|:443… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 46927903 (45M) [application/gzip]
Saving to: ‘heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz’
100%[===========>] 46,927,903 233MB/s in 0.2s
2023-08-07 05:11:59 (233 MB/s) – ‘heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz’ saved [46927903/46927903]
3. Extract the contents.
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ tar –ungzip -xf heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz
4. Clean up by deleting the tar file.
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ rm heroku-linux-x64.tar.gz
6. Configure the PATH variable to include Heroku.
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ echo “export PATH=\$PATH:~/heroku/bin” >> ~/.bashrc
[cloudshell-user@ip-10-4-68-115 ~]$ source ~/.bashrc
AWS Lightsail enables Amazon Web Services customers to host “simple web applications, use pre-configured development stacks like LAMP, Nginx, MEAN, and Node.js.” This includes WordPress-powered websites. Lightsail creates a Debian-based virtual server to host these applications allowing SSH connections. Unfortunately, unlike traditional shared hosting services, mail functionality is not included. This prevents WordPress from sending emails normally including for password resets. Fortunately, there is an easy to use plugin (WP MAIL SMTP) that provides a number of options for sending email including SendLayer, SMTP.com, Sendinblue, Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, SparkPost, Gmail, Microsoft, Amazon SES, Zoho, and All Other SMTP providers.
Since web services do not need to be provided by the same server address or even the same company. It is possible to split web application hosting from mail server hosting via customizing the DNS zone settings (That topic is not addressed here). The goal of this post is to point out the settings necessary to enable the Lightsail application to use mail settings from one of the “All Other SMTP” providers, specifically Mochahost.
First off, you must create an email account on Mochahost. By doing so, you will immediately know the username and password. The configuration for setting up a mail client are available. However, instead of using the website’s domain it is necessary to use the mail server domain in this case, mochaXXXX.mochahost.com. The port will be 587. Encryption will be TLS. Finally, authentication with username and password are required.
Here is an example of the WP MAIL SMTP plugin settings:
Now, send a test email:
And check your email:
All these companies provide great servers and, when you need to scale, you will be in good hands.
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