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Set Up a WordPress Site Using EC2 and RDS

Ready to move beyond shared hosting? This hands-on lab teaches you how to deploy a WordPress site using AWS's most powerful building blocks—EC2 for web and application hosting, and RDS for managed database services. Perfect for developers and solutions architects who want scalable, resilient infrastructure.

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Lab Info
Level
Intermediate
Last updated
Dec 19, 2025
Duration
45m

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Table of Contents
  1. Challenge

    Objective One: Install Packages on EC2

    Install required software packages (listed below) on the EC2 instance and download the WordPress installation package.

    Required Packaged

    • wget
    • php-mysqlnd
    • httpd
    • php-fpm
    • php-mysqli
    • mariadb105-server
    • php-json
    • php
    • php-devel
  2. Challenge

    Objective Two: Create RDS Database

    Create a DB subnet group and provision a MariaDB RDS instance in the database subnets with proper network configuration.

  3. Challenge

    Objective Three: Configure Security Groups

    Configure security groups to allow MySQL traffic from the EC2 instance to the RDS database and verify HTTP access is enabled for the EC2 instance.

  4. Challenge

    Objective Four: Create Database User

    Connect to the RDS database and create a dedicated WordPress user with full privileges on the wordpress_db database.

  5. Challenge

    Objective Five: Configure WordPress

    Create and configure the wp-config.php file with database connection settings and generate WordPress security keys using the provided URL: https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

  6. Challenge

    Objective Six: Install WordPress Files

    Copy WordPress files to the Apache document root (/var/www/html/) and configure Apache to enable .htaccess support for permalinks.

  7. Challenge

    Objective Seven: Complete Installation

    Start the Apache web server and complete the WordPress installation through the web interface (http://ec2-public-ip-address)

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