Hello and welcome to the Web Stack Implementation project!
What is a Web Stack? It is is a group of software components, used to implement or set up various applications (for example, a website). The "stack" refers to the specific layered components (e.g. OS system, webserver, script interpreter, and database) which are built on top of each other. One of the most popular web stacks include LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The LAMP stack will be used for this project!
Linux is an operating system that manages the underlying hardware on your PC. It is an open-source software that is used worldwide. It is flexible and easy to configure.
In order to complete this project, it is necessary to set up a virtual environment. In order to achieve this, first, create a free AWS account and then create a virtual server using the Ubuntu Server OS. More details to come shortly!
You may be wondering, 'what is AWS'? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading Cloud Service Provider in the world. AWS offers a wide variety of databases and services for different types of applications. This allows users to choose the right tool for the job while receiving the best cost and performance.
AWS offers a Free Tier for newly registered account users. This enables users to try out some AWS services free of charge within certain usage limits. For this project, we will utilize the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service, which is covered by the Free Tier!
Let's get started!
Begin by registering and setting up an AWS account and following the directions on the screen. Once you have created your AWS account, navigate to the login page and type in your credentials.
Once you have signed-in to your AWS account, navigate to the top-right of the screen and select your preferred region (this should be the closest region to your physical location).
After you have selected your region, navigate to the search bar and type in EC2. Select the EC2 service that appears.
Next, click on "Launch Instances".
Now we are going to configure our EC2 instance! Select the Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (HVM) as the Amazon Machine Image (AMI).
Then, select "t2.micro" as the instance type. Once you have made the selection, click "Review and Launch".
When you reach the "Review and Launch" page, click the "Launch" at the bottom-right of the page.
Next, you should see a window appear. Create a key pair and then select "Download". Don't lose it! You will need this file in order to connect into your server from your local PC. After you downloaded the key pair, check the box for the acknowledgement, and then click on "Launch Instances".
Great job! You've launched an EC2 instance! You can view your new instance by clicking the "View Instances" button at the bottom-right of your screen. Note: it may take a moment to initialize, so please be patient!
PLEASE NOTE - Anchor tags < > will be used to indicate contents what must be replaced with your unique values. For example, if you have a file named "keypair123.pem" you must enter this information within the corresponding anchor tag: < private-key-name >
Now let's connect to our instance!
Begin by opening Terminal. Once you have opened Terminal, use the cd command to change into the directory that your key pair is located. This is usually the ~/Downloads directory. If you are having difficulty finding it, you can use the ls command to list the contents of your current directory.
Once you have located the key pair, use the command below to activate the key file (.pem). This command will also change permissions (otherwise you may get the error “Bad Permissions”):
$ sudo chmod 0400 <private-key-name>.pem
When prompted, type the password for your local PC and press Enter on your keyboard.
Next, go back to the AWS console for a moment, and navigate to your running EC2 instance. Copy the Public IP address, as shown in the image below:
Now that you've copied the Public IP address, go back to Terminal. Connect to the EC2 instance by using the command below:
$ ssh -i <private-key-name>.pem ubuntu@<Public-IP-address>
Next, you will be asked if you want to continue connecting. Type Yes and press Enter on your keyboard.
To verify that you are connected, you should see your IP address on the top-right of the screen. Nice job! You have successfully connected to your Linux server in the Cloud environment.
What is Apache? Apache is a widely-used fast, reliable, and secure web server software. A web server acts as a middleman between the website visitor browser and the server.
Now we will install Apache using Ubuntu’s package manager: ‘apt’ Begin by using the $ sudo apt update command to check for any available updates.
Next, run the following command to run the Apache package installation:
$ sudo apt install apache2
Terminal will generate a series of code. Once completed, you will see something like this:
Once completed, use the following command to verify that Apache2 is running as a service in our OS:
$ sudo systemctl status apache2
If there is a green dot, then that means it's running! Nice work!
In order to receive traffic to our Web Server, it is imperative to open TCP port 80. This is the default port that web browsers utilize in order to access web pages on the Internet.
When we created the EC2 instance on the AWS console,the TCP port 22 was opened by default. This allowed us to access the EC2 via SSH in Terminal. However, we must add a rule to the security groups of our EC2 configuration, in order to allow inbound connections through port 80.
Begin by navigating to your EC2 instance on the AWS Console. Click on the security group tab and edit the inbound rules of the running EC2 instance.
Next, click on "Edit Inbound Rules", as highlighted in the image below:
Next, click add rule and configure the inbound rules using HTTP as the protocol and 0.0.0.0/0 as the source, so that traffic from any IP address can enter.
Now let's verify whether or not we can receive traffic. On the Terminal, use the command to send a request the Apache HTTP Server on port 80.
$ curl http://localhost:80
You should see something like this:
Next, let's try to verify access through the web browser using the public IP address of the EC2 instance. Open a web browser of your choice and then enter the following url (remember to replace contents within the Anchor Tabs < >):
http://<Public-IP-Address>:80
You should see the following web page. This is the Apache2 Ubuntu Default page:
Congratulations on setting up and running your Apache web server. Next, we will install MySQL, which is an open-source relational database management system. This will allow us to store and manage data for the website.
Begin by using the following command to install MySQL:
$ sudo apt install mysql-server
When prompted, confirm that you want to proceed with the installation by typing Y for "Yes", and then press "Enter" on your Keyboard.
Once the installation is complete, it is best practice to run a security script in order to add more security access to your database system. Use the following command:
$ sudo mysql_secure_installation
You will be asked to validate password component. Type Y for "Yes".
Next, you must choose the level of your password validation. There are three levels of password validation policy:
Please choose either 0 = LOW, 1 = MEDIUM or 2 = STRONG
Please Note:
LOW --- Length >= 8
MEDIUM --- Length >= 8, numeric, mixed case, and special characters
STRONG --- Length >= 8, numeric, mixed case, special characters and dictionary file
Once you are satisfied with your password, enter it then type Y for “Yes” when asked if you want to continue with the password provided.
For the rest of the questions, type Y for "Yes" and press "Enter" on your keyboard at each prompt.
These security measures will remove anonymous users and the test database, disable remote root logins, and then reload these new rules so that the changes will be reflected on the MySQL database.
Your Terminal should look something like this:
Next, you can check whether you can log in to the MySQL console by typing the following command. This command allows you to connect to the MySQL server as the administrative user (root user), which is implied by the use of 'sudo' part of the command:
$ sudo mysql
This will connect to the MySQL server as the administrative database user root, which is inferred by the use of sudo when running this command. You should see the following output:
To exit the MySQL console, type the following:
mysql> exit
Congrats on making it this far! We have reached the final component of the LAMP web stack; PHP is general-purpose scripting language which process code so that it can display dynamic content to the end user.
In addition to installing PHP, we must install php-mysql, which is a PHP module that allows PHP to communicate with MySQL-based databases. We must also install libapache2-mod-php to allow Apache to handle PHP files.
We can simultaneously install all three of these packages. Begin by running the following command on Terminal:
$ sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql
Congrats! The LAMP stack is now completely installed and fully operational.
Next, we will create a virtual host using Apache. A virtual host allows us to have multiple websites located on a single machine! This will be used to test our setup.
Begin by creating the directory for projectlamp using the following command:
$ sudo mkdir /var/www/projectlamp
Next, assign ownership of the directory using the following command:
$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/projectlamp
Next, we must create and open a new configuration file using vi, which is a text editor. Use the command below to open a blank file:
$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/projectlamp.conf
Next, paste in the following configuration by pressing on i on the keyboard to engage the 'insert' mode, then paste the text below:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName projectlamp ServerAlias www.projectlamp ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/projectlamp ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost>
Once you have entered the text, press esc, type :wq, then press "Enter" on your keyboard to write (save) and exit the vi editor.
Next, we will use a series of commands.
To show the new file in the sites-available directory, use the following command. With this Virtua lHost configuration, we are telling Apache to serve projectlamp using /var/www/projectlampl as its web root directory.
$ sudo ls /etc/apache2/sites-available
Next, use the a2ensite command to enable the new virtual host:
$ sudo a2ensite projectlamp
You may want to disable the default website that comes installed with Apache. This is necessary if you are not using a custom domain name, because in this case Apache’s default configuration would overwrite your virtual host.
To disable Apache’s default website use the following command:
$ sudo a2dissite 000-default
To make sure your configuration file doesn’t contain syntax errors, run:
$ sudo apache2ctl configtest
Finally, reload Apache so these changes take effect:
$ sudo systemctl reload apache2
Here is what you can expect to see on your Terminal:
Although our website is now active, the web root /var/www/projectlamp is still empty. Let's create an index.html file in that location so that we will be able to test that the virtual host works properly. Use the command below:
sudo echo 'Hello LAMP from hostname' $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-hostname) 'with public IP' $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4) > /var/www/projectlamp/index.html
Now let's test that the website is correctly displaying our content by opening the EC2 Public IP address in your web browser. http://<Public-IP-Address>:80 .
It should look something like this:
Lastly, we must modify the directory index settings, such that the index.html no longer takes precedence over an index.php file. We can achieve this behavior by editing the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf file and then changing the order in which the index.php file is listed within the DirectoryIndex directive. Use the following command:
sudo vim /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
In the vi editor, modify the default text to the following:
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm :
Next, after saving and closing the file, you must reload Apache so the changes take effect. Use the following command:
$ sudo systemctl reload apache2
Finally, we will create a PHP script. This will test whether or not PHP is correctly installed and configured on the server. Use the following command to create a new file named index.php inside your custom web root folder:
$ vim /var/www/projectlamp/index.php
This will open a blank file. Add the following text inside of the file:
<?php
phpinfo();
Once you have completed this step, save and close the file.
Refresh the page on your browser, and you will see a page similar to this (note: contents partially redacted for privacy):
Congratulations! You did it! We have completed our LAMP Web Stack Implementation.
Don't forget to terminate your EC2 instance and it's associated components on the AWS Console. Also, be sure to remove the file you created as it contains sensitive information using the following command:
$ sudo rm /var/www/projectlamp/index.php
Credit: This guide was inspired by SkillEmbassy