This is a short post summarizing some issues I encountered while installing apache on an EC2 – running amazon linux 2. (Also read Configuring Apache and Certbot. Also read – Installing certbot on your amazon linux 2 EC2 instance )

Check your ec2 linux flavor

cat /etc/os-release. lsb_release

Install Apache on ec2

 sudo yum -y install httpd
 sudo service httpd start

Change from ssm-user to ec2-user  (If you logged in via the systems session manager)

sudo su ec2-user

Create a testweb directory and a sample hello.html

sudo mkdir testweb  sudo chown  ec2-user testweb sudo chmod -R o+r testweb
cd testdir

Create a sample hello.html file.

$ echo "<html><h1>Hello from EC2 Apache</h1></html>" > hello.html    

Test through a browser

http://EC2-public-DNS/testweb/hello.html

What could go wrong ?

1. Ensure your SG is set up correctly – to allow inbound 80 traffic

apache on ec2 Security Group
apache on ec2 Security Group

2. Ensure you have a virtual host defined in your httpd.conf file (see examples here )

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

# Ensure that Apache listens on port 80
Listen 80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/example1"
    ServerName www.example.com

    # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName www.example2.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example2.com/public_html
    ServerAlias example2.com
    ErrorLog /var/www/example2.com/error.log
    CustomLog /var/www/example2.com/requests.log combined
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/example2/apache.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/example2/apache.key
</VirtualHost>

Check the error log and the access log for apache for errors

egrep -v '#|^$' /var/log/httpd/access.log  OR cat  /var/log/httpd/access.log | grep error cat  /var/log/httpd/error_log | grep error

Summary

While not difficult, I encountered a few hiccups installing and configuring apache on ec2 (setting up a virtual host, ensuring that I switched to the ec2-user…).  Setting up apache on amazon linux should be straightforward. There is a nuance that this post did not deal with – that of storing your web folders on the EBS volume.




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