Creating a Server Image

Provision the Server

Here's the script we used to provision the server:

  1#!/usr/bin/env bash
  2 
  3set -e
  4 
  5###
  6# Note: This script is assumed to be run as user root
  7##
  8 
  9 
 10 
 11## Add PHP repository
 12add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php
 13apt-get update
 14 
 15 
 16 
 17## Install utilities and PHP
 18## Configure PHP-FPM to run as user "ubuntu"
 19apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl wget jq zip unzip ripgrep pv \
 20    nginx supervisor \
 21    php8.1-fpm php8.1-cli \
 22    php8.1-pgsql php8.1-sqlite3 php8.1-gd \
 23    php8.1-curl php8.1-memcached \
 24    php8.1-imap php8.1-mysql php8.1-mbstring \
 25    php8.1-xml php8.1-zip php8.1-bcmath php8.1-soap \
 26    php8.1-intl php8.1-readline \
 27    php8.1-msgpack php8.1-igbinary php8.1-ldap \
 28    php8.1-redis \
 29    && php -r "readfile('http://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php -- --install-dir=/usr/bin/ --filename=composer \
 30    && sed -i "s/user = .*/user = ubuntu/" /etc/php/8.1/fpm/pool.d/www.conf \
 31    && service php8.1-fpm restart \
 32    && curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x -o nodesource_setup.sh \
 33    && bash nodesource_setup.sh \
 34    && apt-get install -y nodejs \
 35    && rm nodesource_setup.sh
 36 
 37 
 38 
 39## Configure Nginx to host site at location /home/ubuntu/onboarding-aws
 40tee /etc/nginx/sites-available/default > /dev/null <<EOT
 41server {
 42    listen 80 default_server;
 43 
 44    root /home/ubuntu/onboarding-aws/public;
 45 
 46    index index.html index.htm index.php;
 47 
 48    server_name _;
 49 
 50    charset utf-8;
 51 
 52    location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
 53    location = /robots.txt  { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
 54 
 55    client_max_body_size 100M;
 56 
 57    location / {
 58        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
 59    }
 60 
 61    location ~ \.php$ {
 62        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
 63        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
 64    }
 65 
 66    error_page 404 =200 /index.php;
 67 
 68    location ~ /\.ht {
 69        deny all;
 70    }
 71}
 72EOT
 73 
 74service nginx reload
 75 
 76 
 77 
 78## CloudWatch Agent
 79cd /tmp
 80wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/amazoncloudwatch-agent/ubuntu/amd64/latest/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb
 81dpkg -i -E ./amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb
 82rm amazon-cloudwatch-agent.deb
 83 
 84# To check if it's running:
 85# service amazon-cloudwatch-agent status
 86 
 87# Configure CloudWatch Agent for our application + Nginx logs
 88tee /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.d/config.json > /dev/null <<EOT
 89{
 90    "agent": {
 91        "metrics_collection_interval": 60,
 92        "region": "us-east-2",
 93        "logfile": "/var/log/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.log",
 94        "debug": false
 95    },
 96    "logs": {
 97        "logs_collected": {
 98            "files": {
 99                "collect_list": [
100                    {
101                        "file_path": "/home/ubuntu/onboarding-aws/storage/logs/laravel.log",
102                        "log_group_name": "onboarding-aws-production-app",
103                        "log_stream_name": "app-log-{hostname}",
104                        "timestamp_format": "[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S]",
105                        "multi_line_start_pattern": "{timestamp_format}"
106                    },
107                    {
108                        "file_path": "/var/log/nginx/access.log",
109                        "log_group_name": "onboarding-aws-production-access",
110                        "log_stream_name": "web-access-{hostname}",
111                        "timestamp_format" :"[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z]"
112                    },
113                    {
114                        "file_path": "/var/log/nginx/error.log",
115                        "log_group_name": "onboarding-aws-production-error",
116                        "log_stream_name": "web-error-{hostname}",
117                        "timestamp_format" :"[%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S %z]"
118                    }
119                ]
120            }
121        }
122    }
123}
124EOT

Create an AMI

We create an image from a snapshot of the EBS disk, but you can also create an image directly from the server. However it's recommended the server is off when doing so (so data isn't actively being written to the disk drive).