Setting up an AWS Lightsail instance for the first time

There’s great support from bitnami about doing this, but it’s in lots of different places, so I’m putting it here for reference.

This is for a new WordPress instance in lightsail.

Create your new instance – for me I’ve gone (currently $10/month with 2Gb RAM and 60Gb SSD,

Create a static IP and assign it to the instance – this helps if you spin up a new instance in future so you don’t need to reassign DNS values

Now update the DNS A records to point to the static IP.

Now open up SSH terminal. The first thing I do is grab the WordPress creds by:

sudo cat /home/bitnami/bitnami_credentials

We need to install the SSL cert. I’ve taken to using the bncert tool – hoping it will automatically renew!

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

Then enter the domains and any subdomains followed by a space, e.g example.com www.example.com

Then you have some options to go through. For me it’s Y N Y! That is to say:

1. I want any users who come to HTTP://example.com to be redirected to HTTPS://example.com

2. I don’t want example.com to redirect to www.example.com

3. But I do want www.example.com to redirect to example.com

Next associate an email address with the installation and accept the user agreement (assuming you’re happy to!)

Finally agree to the the installation proceed and wait a few moments for it to do it’s magic.

That’s it. The certificate should automatically renew every 80 days…