ClassicPress on AWS User Guide

Overview

This image runs ClassicPress, the community led, business focused fork of WordPress. ClassicPress keeps the familiar, stable content management experience that millions of sites rely on and stays fully compatible with the WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem, so you get a lean, predictable CMS without giving up the tools you already know.

The stack is LAMP: ClassicPress 2.7.0 on PHP 8.3 under Apache, with a MySQL database. The install is completed headlessly with WP-CLI, so the public install wizard is never exposed. The database data directory, /var/lib/mysql, and the ClassicPress webroot, /var/www, are each a dedicated, independently resizable EBS data volume, so both the database and the site files are kept off the operating system disk.

The administrator account is created on the first boot of every deployed instance, and its password, the database password and the database root password are all generated freshly on each instance, so two instances launched from the same Amazon Machine Image never share a credential. The build time database is destroyed before the image is captured, so no default login ships in the image. The credentials are written to /stage/scripts/classicpress-credentials.log with mode 0600 so that only the root user can read them.

The site address is derived from the request host on every request, so the site answers correctly on the instance public IP, its private IP, or any custom domain you later point at it, with no reconfiguration and no redirect to a stale address.

Prerequisites

Before you deploy this image you need:

• An Amazon Web Services account where you can launch EC2 instances
• IAM permissions to launch instances, create security groups, and subscribe to AWS Marketplace products
• An EC2 key pair in the target Region for SSH access to the instance
• A VPC and subnet in the target Region, with a security group allowing inbound port 22 from your management network and ports 80 and 443 for the website
• The AWS CLI (version 2) installed locally if you plan to deploy from the command line

Step 1: Launch the Instance from the AWS Marketplace

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for ClassicPress. Select the cloudimg listing and choose Select, then Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of m5.large or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login). Under Network settings select your VPC and subnet, and either create or select a security group that opens port 22 from your management network and ports 80 and 443 for the website. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger; the database and web volumes are attached automatically.

Select Launch instance. First boot initialisation takes a short time after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass, while the database is created, ClassicPress is installed and the per instance administrator is provisioned.

Step 2: Launch the Instance from the AWS CLI

The following block launches an instance from the cloudimg ClassicPress Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace the AMI ID with the one shown on the Marketplace listing, the key name with your EC2 key pair name, the subnet ID with your subnet ID, and the security group ID with a security group that opens ports 22, 80 and 443 as described above.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type m5.large \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=classicpress}]'

When the instance reaches the Running state and its status checks pass, note its public IP address or DNS name from the EC2 console or with aws ec2 describe-instances.

Step 3: Connect to Your Instance

Connect over SSH using your key pair and the login user for your operating system variant.

ssh -i <key-name>.pem ubuntu@<instance-public-ip>

Step 4: Retrieve the Administrator Password

The administrator password is unique to your instance and was generated on first boot. Read it as root:

sudo cat /stage/scripts/classicpress-credentials.log

The file lists the site URL, the admin URL, the administrator login name (cloudimg) and the generated password, along with the database name, database user and generated database passwords. Keep this file somewhere safe.

Step 5: Confirm ClassicPress Is Running

Over SSH, confirm the web server and the database are active, that the expected ports are listening, and that ClassicPress is the expected version:

for s in apache2 mysql; do echo "$s: $(systemctl is-active $s)"; done
sudo ss -tln | grep -E ':80|:3306'
grep -oE "\$cp_version = '[^']+'" /var/www/html/classicpress/wp-includes/version.php
sudo -u www-data wp core is-installed --path=/var/www/html/classicpress && echo "core installed"

You should see both services active, ports 80 and 3306 listening, the ClassicPress version reported as 2.7.0, and core installed.

Confirm the site and the login page answer with HTTP 200:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'home:  %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/
curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'login: %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/wp-login.php

Step 6: Sign In to the Dashboard

The website and the dashboard are served on port 80 by Apache. In a browser, go to the admin sign in page:

http://<instance-public-ip>/wp-admin/

Sign in with the administrator login name cloudimg and the password from the credentials file.

After signing in you land on the ClassicPress dashboard, where the At a Glance, Activity and news panels summarise your site.

Step 7: Create Pages and Posts

ClassicPress uses the classic content editor. To write a post, open Posts and choose Add New; to build a page, open Pages and choose Add New. Give it a title, write your content with the classic editor toolbar, and choose Publish. Pretty permalinks are already enabled, so each page and post gets a clean URL.

Manage all of your content, categories and tags from the Posts and Pages lists in the dashboard.

Step 8: The Published Site

Your visitors browse the site at the instance address. Because ClassicPress is fully compatible with the WordPress theme and plugin ecosystem, you can install any compatible theme from Appearance and extend the site with plugins from Plugins.

Step 9: The Database and Web Volumes

The MySQL database lives on a dedicated EBS volume mounted at /var/lib/mysql, and the ClassicPress code and uploaded media live on a second dedicated EBS volume mounted at /var/www, both kept off the operating system disk and independently resizable. Confirm the layout:

findmnt /var/lib/mysql
findmnt /var/www
df -h /var/lib/mysql /var/www

To grow either tier, resize the EBS volume in the AWS console and then grow the filesystem on the instance; the fstab entries reference the filesystem UUID so the layout persists across reboots and instance replacement.

Step 10: Add a Custom Domain and Enable HTTPS

Because the site derives its address from the request host, you can point a DNS name at the instance and the site answers on it immediately, with no ClassicPress reconfiguration. To serve the site over HTTPS, install a certificate with Certbot for Apache once your domain resolves to the instance:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-apache
sudo certbot --apache -d your-domain.example

Certbot obtains and installs the certificate and configures Apache to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. Renewals run automatically.

Step 11: Backup and Maintenance

Back up the MySQL database regularly. A logical dump of the ClassicPress database is the simplest approach and can be scheduled with cron:

sudo mysqldump --single-transaction classicpress > /var/backups/classicpress-$(date +%F).sql

Also back up /var/www/html/classicpress/wp-content, which holds your themes, plugins and uploaded media. For a full point in time copy, take EBS snapshots of the /var/lib/mysql and /var/www volumes. Keep the operating system patched with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, and keep ClassicPress core, themes and plugins updated from the dashboard.

Support

This image is supported by cloudimg. For help with deployment, theme and plugin setup, version upgrades, performance tuning, MySQL database administration, TLS and custom domains, or scaling, contact cloudimg support. Include the instance ID and Region when you raise a ticket.