Hosting a second site on an AWS Lightsail instance

If you already host WordPress on your Lightsail instance you can set up a second website on it.

• Log into the AWs console at console.aws.com
• In the search field enter lightsail and select Lightsail
  
  
• Select the LIghtsail instance
• Log into the Lightsail instance with SSH
  
  
• Create a directory for the second website. Execute the following commands in the terminal

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/MYSITE
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data /var/www/MYSITE
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/MYSITE

Upload the site with SFTP

• Install the free SFTP Explorer from https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n6s8v9qq224?hl=en-US&gl=US
• Connect to the Lightsail instance with the SFTP client
• Upload the site contents to the /var/www/mysite directory

Configure the Apache Virtual Host

• In the SSH session execute

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/MYSITE.conf

• Paste the following in to the file

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName ://YOURDOMAIN.COM
    DocumentRoot /var/www/MYSITE

    <Directory /var/www/MYSITE>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/MYSITE_error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/MYSITE_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

• Press Ctrl + O, then Enter to save, and Ctrl + X to exit.

Enable the website and restart the service

sudo a2ensite MYSITE.conf
sudo apache2ctl configtest
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Add an alias for the new site to the available sites files (HTTP and HTTPS)

• Execute

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

• Add an alias in the <VirtualHost *:80> block

Alias /MYSITE/var/www/MYSITE

• Add the allias to the HTTPS protocol too

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf 

• Add an alias to the <VirtualHost *:443> block

Alias /MYSITE /var/www/MYSITE

• Retest the server

sudo apache2ctl configtest
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Accessing the second website

The second site is available through the primary domain name and a folder name

• In the web browser navigate to YOURDOMAIN.COM/MYSITE