I’m Moving… to AWS

I decided to drink the AWS Kool-aid.

I’d like to learn a little more about building, deploying, and managing applications in a dev-opsy way. So I decided to just jump feet first into it.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie. First, I tried to set-up Gatsby as a CMS — I felt that I was re-inventing the wheel a bit considering I already had my WordPress blog.

I want to cut down on the number of services I use for the same purpose. Currently, this blog was hosted through a managed WordPress account on GoDaddy. GoDaddy has treated me well in years past – I know it’s not the most tech-savvy solution, nor is it the most cost-effective – but it is intuitive and painless. So what I decided to do was to move both my blog and my domain over to AWS services.

WordPress Blog to LightSail

I am going to skip over screenshots here, because this is me talking about my experience and not exactly a how-to. You can reach out to me on Twitter and I’d be glad to try to troubleshoot it with you.

This will assume you know something about AWS and WordPress, as well. If you don’t, I would start elsewhere.

A general walkthrough:

Create an AWS LightSail instance using the newest build of WordPress
Export your WordPress blog (export everything!).
- If you can, download your theme from FTP or use a theme-exporting plugin to do this.
Set up a static IP for your LightSail instance
Use the SSH terminal to find the bitnami default password (Username should be user) by typing cat $HOME/bitnami_application_password
Copy the provided password and navigate to the IP of your LightSail instance. Add /admin to the URL.
Use user and the copied password as your WordPress credentials.
Once in, import your exported WordPress XML and theme.
Make sure that your previous Admin user, if it existed, is still an admin.
Remove the Bitnami welcome banner.

Domain Transferral

This one is pretty straightforward, but it’s super important that you follow all the steps and don’t skip them. As such, and because I don’t want someone to blame me if something goes wrong AWS has already put together a pretty thorough guide here, so I would just follow it. The most important part is to unlock your domain from its current provider, then most of them will provide guides for their own services for how to migrate a domain elsewhere.

Setting Up React Projects on AWS Amplify

This was shockingly easy to do with some hints from Amazon.

Get project to stable state on your GitHub repo, making sure that your start command launches everything needed to make your app run.
Create an AWS Amplify instance for the app.
Choose “Deploy” when prompted, then log into your GitHub account.
Set the repo and branch you would like automatically pushed to your instance.
Voila, AWS will take care of the rest.

There are plenty of ways to congregate your web services into AWS from disparate systems. Time, basic familiarity with the AWS terminology and willingness to read the available guides is really all you’ll need in terms of expertise to get everything in one place. Your wallet and your password manager will thank you!