A Comprehensive Guide: Deploy PHP Project on Amazon Web Services(AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a scalable and reliable cloud platform for hosting PHP applications.

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are increasingly turning to cloud computing solutions to streamline operations, cut costs, and scale effortlessly. Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform that offers services for storage, computing and content delivery. Deploying a PHP project on Amazon Web Services can be a great way to deploy scalable web applications. AWS provides services like EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Database Service), and S3 (Simple Storage Service), among others, to help you manage and scale your application.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up a PHP project on AWS:

Create an AWS Account

Follow these steps to create AWS account:

1. Visit the Amazon Web Services Sign Up Page.

2. Provide your billing information (AWS offers a free tier for new users).

3. Verify your identity and complete the sign-up process.

Launch an EC2 Instance

• Log into AWS Console: Visit Amazon Web Services Management Console.
• Navigate to EC2: In the search bar, type "EC2" and click on EC2.
• Launch an Instance:
• Click the Launch Instance button.
• Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Select Amazon Linux 2 AMI or Ubuntu Server (depending on your preference).
• Choose the Instance Type. For testing purposes, t2.micro (eligible for the free tier) is sufficient.
• Configure Instance Details: You can leave most settings as the default unless you need custom configurations.
• Add Storage: 8GB is usually enough for a small project.?
• Configure Security Group: Add rules to allow inbound traffic on port 80 (HTTP) and port 22 (SSH).
• Review and Launch: Click Review and Launch, then create or select a key pair for SSH access to the instance.

Connect to Your EC2 Instance

Once your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance is up and running, you’ll need to SSH into it::

Open your terminal or command prompt.

Navigate to the directory where your .pem key file is stored and run the following command (replace your-key.pem with your actual key file and your-ec2-public-ip with the EC2 instance's public IP address):?

chmod 400 your-key.pem

ssh -i your-key.pem ec2-user@your-ec2-public-ip

For Ubuntu instances, replace ec2-user with ubuntu:

ssh -i your-key.pem ubuntu@your-ec2-public-ip        

?Install Nginx/Apache, PHP, and MySQL

Now that you're connected to your EC2 instance, you need to install Apache or nginx (the web server), PHP, and MySQL to run your PHP application. Here we install apache.

For Amazon Linux 2:

Update the package manager:?

sudo yum update -y

Install Apache:
sudo yum install httpd -y

Install PHP:
sudo yum install php php-mysqlnd php-fpm -y

Start Apache:
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd        

Check Apache and PHP:

Open your browser and visit https://your-ec2-public-ip. You should see the Apache test page.

To check PHP, create a test file:

sudo echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/info.php        

Now, visit https://your-ec2-public-ip/info.php in your browser to see the PHP info page.

For Ubuntu:

Update package manager:

sudo apt update -y

Install Apache:
sudo apt install apache2 -y

Install PHP:
sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql -y

Start Apache:
sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo systemctl enable apache2        

Check Apache and PHP:

Create a test PHP file in /var/www/html/:

sudo echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/info.php        

Visit https://your-ec2-public-ip/info.php to confirm that PHP is installed correctly.

Upload Your PHP Project Files

You need to upload your PHP project files to your EC2 instance.

Using SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) From your local machine, run the following command to copy your PHP project to the EC2 instance (replace your-key.pem, your-project with actual file paths, and your-ec2-public-ip with your instance’s public IP):

scp -i your-key.pem /path/to/your/project/* ec2-user@your-ec2-public-ip:/var/www/html/

Using SFTP/FTP Clients You can also use FTP tools like FileZilla or WinSCP to transfer your project files to /var/www/html/.

Set Up a MySQL Database with Amazon RDS (Optional)

If your PHP application needs a database, you can use Amazon RDS to set up a managed MySQL database:

• Go to the RDS Dashboard in the AWS console and select Create Database.
• Choose MySQL as the database engine.
• Configure the database instance (e.g., instance size, storage, credentials).
• Once the database is created, note the RDS endpoint (this is your connection URL).
• Update your PHP application's database connection settings with the RDS endpoint, username, and password.
• Modify the security group of the RDS instance to allow access from your EC2 instance.

Configure a Domain Name and SSL (Optional)

If you want to use a custom domain (e.g., www.yoursite.com):

• Set Up Route 53 (AWS’s DNS service) or configure your domain in another DNS provider to point to your EC2 instance's public IP.
• Set Up SSL: Use Let’s Encrypt or AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to add an SSL certificate for secure HTTPS connections.

Test and Monitor Your PHP Application

• Open browser and navigate to your EC2 instance’s public IP or custom domain to see your PHP project in action.
• Verify that all features of your application are working correctly (e.g., database connection, file uploads).
• Optionally, set up CloudWatch to monitor your instance’s performance and logs.

Scale Your PHP Application (Optional)

If your application grows and requires more resources, Amazon Web Services offers services like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to handle high traffic loads.

• Auto Scaling: Create an auto-scaling group to automatically add more EC2 instances based on traffic demand.
• Elastic Load Balancer: Distribute incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances for higher availability.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can successfully deploy your PHP project on AWS, taking advantage of AWS's scalable and secure cloud infrastructure. From EC2 instances to RDS databases, AWS offers tools you need to host, manage, and scale your PHP applications. If you want to explore advanced features like automated scaling or continuous deployment pipelines, AWS has the solutions to support your growing needs.