Hosting a static website on Amazon AWS using EC2

Background

This post assumes you are familiar with Amazon AWS services, specially EC2 which we are going to use today to see how we can deploy a static website in a minute. If not kindly refer to my earlier posts in the same -

• Launching and connecting to your new EC2 instance of your Amazon web service

 Hosting a static website on Amazon AWS using EC2

Go ahead and launch Amazon Linux AMI on EC2. Keep all the configurations default except the security group. We are not really interested in others. In security group you need to allow ports corresponding to, ssh (22), http (80) and https(443) protocols. We are going to use http protocol for this demo. It looks like following for me -

 NOTE :  We need to SSH into your EC2 instance to host our static website. So we need that port open.

Once you have SSHed into your machine. If you don't know how to do this please refer my earlier post (linked in background and related links section). Once done follow below steps -

1. sudo su 
2.  yum update
3. yum install httpd
4. service httpd status
5. service httpd start
6. chkconfig httpd on

 Understanding above commands -

1.  sudo su will elevate your role to super user. You really don't need this. But I generally do it since I like root user :)
2. Do a update just to ensure you have the latest patches installed so that you are covered from a security standpoint.
3. Next install httpd. This is a http daemon used to hist your static website. This essentially listens on port 80 (http) and serves request back. More details on Wiki.
4. Next we check whether httpd daemon is up and running. service is the command used for that. 1st run should say that this service is stopped.
5. Now you can start up this service with same command but using start. Again you can rerun above command just to make sure your service is up and running.
6. chkconfig checks whether service is configured for startup. This commands guarantees httpd service starts on system startup.

 Now that we have out httpd service up and running, you can simply hit your public DNS and see what you can view. It should ideally show your default apache page like follows -

 You can get the public DNS from your EC2 dashboard -

 Now lets try to show our custom webpage. For this go to -

• /var/www/html

Here create a file called index.html and paste your html content there and save it.

 That's it. Refresh your page and see if you can view your html changes.

 Let me know if there are any questions. Thanks.


If you want to see how a static website directly from S3 you can view following video -

Related Links

•  Launching and connecting to your new EC2 instance of your Amazon web service(OSFG)
• Host a static website on EC2 instance by deploying it from S3(OSFG)