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Mariano Ramborger
Mariano Ramborger

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AWS - Dev associate: EC2 (Part 2).

So in part 1 we got our EC2 instance up and running. Now it’s time to connect to it from our local machine.

EC2 offers multiple ways to connect to an EC2 instance, but I think SSH provides the best experience. So let’s open up a console!

Remember the key-pair we downloaded at the end of part one?
I hope you still have it because we are going to use it.

BUT! We won’t be able to use it if it’s publicly viewable. So we’ll run the command:

chmod 400 [keypair.pem]
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Which will set the permissions for that file so that only its owner can read it. Following that we’ll grab the instance public ip from the AWS console:

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We’ll now SSH into the instance with the following command:

ssh -i “[keypair.pem]” [our user]@[public IPv4 DNS] 
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In this case, since we have picked the default options, we’ll log with “ec2-user”, since this is the default owner of the AMI we have chosen.
You will probably receive a message stating that the authenticity of the host could not be established, and receive a prompt to answer whether you still want to connect. Answer yes.
With that, we are in.

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Now, Before doing anything else, we’ll run the command

sudo su
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To escalate our privileges, so we don’t have to include sudo in the following commands.
By now, the command line interface has probably prompted you to run

yum update-y 
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to update packages, so let's just do that.

After it's done, let's install the apache package which will enable us to launch an apache server

yum install httpd –y
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Once it's finished, let's start it with

systemctl start httpd 
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With this Our server apache is up and running. But just for fun let’s add some content to it before checking it out. So we'll enter

cd /var/www/html
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Once inside, we’ll create an index.html file. I don’t want anything fancy so let just

nano index.html
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And we'll write some very basic html into it.

<html>
 <body>
  <h1>
   Hello Cloud! 
  </h1>
 </html>
</body>
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Now back on the AWS console we can grab our Instance’s ip and paste it on our browser.

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And with that, our web server is up and displaying our html code. While rather simple, this two-parter will be the basis of many future posts. If all of this seemed too easy, don’t worry: it’ll only become more complex from now on.

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