Do you know nothing about Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Linux server administration, but want to get a PHP/MySQL server set up on AWS? I will show you how to set up PHP and MySQL on one of Amazon’s free servers

Amazon Web Services has a ton of different products, but the one you want is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Go there, and click “Sign Up for Amazon EC2”.

Once you’ve gotten that set up, go to the AWS Management Console, and click on “Instances” in the Navigation panel. AnInstance is just a virtual server – so let’s create one! Click “Launch Instance” under “My Instances”, and select “Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI”. On the Instance Details phase, select “Micro” (which is Free tier eligible). Continue until you need to enter the “Name” – if you don’t know what else to call it, just use “Web/DB server”.

Next you create a Key Pair – this will be the credentials you’ll use to SSH into the box. The instructions here should be fairly straightforward. Next is the Security Group, which will be used to specify the firewall used for your instance. Feel free to use the default Group for now. Continue to the Review phase and launch it!

You should now be able to SSH into your instance using your .pem file with ssh -i [FILE NAME].pem ec2-user@ec2-[IP ADDRESS].compute-1.amazonaws.com. Alright, we’ve got a server up and running! However, no software are installed to it till now. Let’s install some software.

Configuring the Linux Server

Below I’ll show you how to set up PHP and MySQL on the server. I’ve separated PHP and MySQL so that it’s easier to adapt this to having two instances.

PHP

Install PHP using following line

sudo yum install php-mysql php php-xml php-mcrypt php-mbstring php-cli mysql httpd

Press ‘y’ for each of the prompts that shows up. Note that you’re logged in as ec2-user, so you need to sudo all of these commands.

You should now be able to create and run a PHP test file. Next, let’s get MySQL up and running.

MySQL server

First, install and begin running the server:

sudo yum install mysql-server

sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start

Next, set the root password. I’ve found this password generatorto be just dandy.

mysqladmin -u root password '[PASSWORD]'

Now we set up two users for MySQL: the administrator, which you’ll use to create and modify tables; and the app user, which the app will use to query the DB (with more limited privileges). Log into MySQL as root (mysql -u root -p) and enter each of the following lines:

CREATE DATABASE [DB NAME];

CREATE USER '[DB NAME]_admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '[ADMIN PASSWORD]';

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, ALTER ON [DB NAME].* TO '[DB NAME]_admin'@'localhost';

CREATE USER '[DB NAME]_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '[USER PASSWORD]';

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON [DB NAME].* TO '[DB NAME]_user'@'localhost';

You may want to fine-tune your database settings further than this, but this is a good start.

Make it web-accessible

We now have PHP and MySQL running on the box, but cannot access it through a browser. We need to configure the web server and set up an Elastic IP.

Web Server

First, let’s create a test PHP file that will be accessed by the browser. Create directories so that you can put your file in/opt/app/current1. Make an index.php file that contains whatever you want.

If you want to FTP transfer files to your server, you’ll want to give the ec2-user permissions to modify files in your web directory:

sudo chown ec2-user /opt/app/current

To set up the web server, httpd, we need to first modify its configuration file, located at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Open it up with vim, emacs, or your favorite text editor, and go to the bottom of the file. Here you’ll see a small section on theVirtualHost (between  and). Uncomment it out and set DocumentRoot to/opt/app/current. Restart (or start) httpd:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Elastic IP and Security Groups

In the AWS Management Console, click on “Elastic IPs”, then “Allocate New Address” under “Addresses”. Once the address is created, click on it, then “Associate Address”. Select the instance and associate it.

Now click on “Security Groups” in the Navigation panel. Select theSecurity Group that you used for the instance (probably the default one). Under the “Inbound” tab, add an HTTP rule (port 80). Click “Apply Rule Changes”, and you should now be able to access your website! In your browser, go to http://ec2-[IP ADDRESS].compute-1.amazonaws.com/, where the IP address is the Elastic IP you made with periods replaced with hyphens.

Hello World! or Putting it all together

We now have all the pieces we need to access MySQL from PHP and serve that to the browser-accessible website. So let’s log intomysql and create a sample table:

mysql -u [DB NAME]_admin -p

[type password]

mysql> use [DB NAME];

mysql> CREATE TABLE test (message VARCHAR(255));

mysql> INSERT INTO test (message) VALUES ('Hello world!');

Now modify your index.php file (/opt/app/current/index.php) to be the following:

$conn =  new mysqli('localhost', '[DB NAME]_user', '[USER PASSWORD]', '[DB NAME]');

$result = $conn->query("SELECT message FROM test;");

$row = $result->fetch_assoc();

echo $row['message'];

?>

We now have a fully functioning PHP and MySQL server!

Taking it further

That’s it for the basics, but there’s so much more that you can do now.

PHPUnit

sudo pear upgrade

sudo yum install php-pear

sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de

sudo pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com

sudo pear channel-discover components.ez.no

sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

phpMyAdmin

I’ve found it handy to set up an administration area for my sites using a different port on the same URL. Note that port 80 is the default for web traffic, but 8080 is also commonly used.

Create /opt/app/admin. Then, in httpd.conf, add the lineListen 8080 after Listen 80 and add another VirtualHostentry, using  and pointing to the/opt/app/admin directory. Update your Security Group to allow traffic over port 8080. Make sure to restart Apache and you should now be able to access your admin folder through your browser at yourdomain.com:8080.

You can then download phpMyAdmin into/opt/app/admin/pma and unzip it. Using the [DB NAME]_admin user, you can now manage your databases there through your browser.