Installing WriteFreely on AWS LightSail
TutorialsI recently discovered WriteFreely and decided to install it at writer.thomasott.io to test it. I set it up on AWS Lightsail using the smallest instance available and a standard LAMP stack image. It took about an hour of set-up time and I wanted to share my installation notes here.
- Spin up a LAMP stack on AWS Lightsail and attach and static IP to it
- Point an A record to the static IP
- SSH into the LAMP instance and change the directory to the htdocs
- Download WriteFreely in the htdocs directory using sudo
- Unzip the tar ball, it will create a writefreely directory
- Configure it by following these instructions
- Setup the writefreely.service and make sure you set WorkingDirectory=/home/bitnami/htdocs and ExecStart=/home/bitnami/htdocs/writefreely/writefreely
- Enable the service by doing sudo systemctl enable writefreely.service and then sudo systemctl start writefreely.service
- Run the bncert-tool to get your SSL certs and install
- Run sudo writefreely - config to configure as standalone production server
- Get your keys by running sudo writefreely - key-gen
- Restart Apache or reboot the instance
- Check sudo journalctl -f -u writefreely to see if it’s working
I also reviewed this post from the forums, it was very helpful for Apache-based web servers.
Note: Writefreely is a minimalistic blogging software that lets you create publications. It reminds me of Ghost but in a very early “alpha” stage.
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