How to Create a WordPress Instance in Amazon Lightsail

For today’s blog post, I’m going to provide the steps required to create a WordPress Instance in Amazon Lightsail. Use cases for Amazon Lightsail include launching simple web applications, create custom websites, build small business applications, and the ability to spin up test environments. Please keep in mind, an Amazon account is required.

• Log into AWS, search for Lightsail in the upper-left corner, and then select Lightsail to proceed.

AWS

AWS Lightsail

• Select Create Instance and then choose your preferred AWS Location, Platform\OS, and Blueprint. In this example, I changed the AWS Location from Oregon, Zone A (US-West-2A) to Virginia (US-EAST-1).

Create an Instance

Default AWS Location

Preferred AWS Location

• Next, select your preferred platform (Linux/Unix or Microsoft Windows). For the purpose of this post, my OS will be Linux\Unix and the blueprint will be WordPress 6.0.2-1.

Apps + OS

• You then have the option to add a launch script and assign or create an SSH key pair, but I decided to proceed and accept the defaults. The next step requires you to select an Instance Plan and I defaulted to the $3.5/month plan which includes the first three months free (Amazon Lightsail Pricing info can be found here). Keep in mind, you do have the option to toggle between the various options (price per month, memory, processing, storage, and transfer) to view the differences. Finally, you provide your instance a unique name and how many instances you’re interested in. For this purpose, I named it AlRasheedWordPress-1 and selected one instance. I did not select any Key-Only or Key-Value tags and then clicked on Create Instance to complete the process.

AWS Instance Plan and Name

New AWS Instance

• In order to connect to the web based terminal, please select the Terminal Symbol and a new window will appear shortly and will then attempt to log me into the session. Please keep in mind, the credentials are stored in a file in the Home Directory called bitnami_credentials. The content of that file can be obtained using the cat command (cat bitnami_credentials).

Terminal Symbol

cat command

cat command output

• I then used the IP that was assigned to my instance, copied it into the address bar of a web browser, and then logged into the WordPress site using the username and password I obtained using the cat command (cat bitnami_credentials).

IP Address

WordPress Instance

Within a few moments, my instance has been created. From start to finish, it took less than five minutes. This concludes this post and I hope you found it useful. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.