I have been storing backups of database dumps and the served HTML/PHP files of my Wordpress blog for years now, but never tried to re-deploy the website from these backups. Today I’ve finally spent a few hours to figure this out. These are my step-by-step notes so it’ll be faster next time.

  • Start an AMI of the bitnami LAMP stack on EC2
    • Put it in a security group that allows HTTP(S) traffic
    • Write down the “application password” from the System log. It looks something like:
      Setting Bitnami application password to 'i1y0QrIDMBNH'
    • upload (scp) DB.sql and wordpress HTML/PHP zip to the server’s home directory
  • SSH over there:
    ssh -i ~/AWS/mykey.pem bitnami@52.59.227.153
    • mysql -u root -p
    • Use the application password to login
    • Set up the database: 
      CREATE DATABASE DB1738312;
CREATE USER 'U1738312'@'localhost';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* To 'U1738312'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 't42KJ423;  # Use your real wordpress site's user, DB, and password
    • Then source the exported SQL script to fill the database:
      mysql -u U1738312 -p DB1738312 < DB1738312_2018-07-03.sql
    • unzip my-wordpress-backup.zip -d htdocs/
      (have index.php in htdocs/, not a subdir, though)
      chmod -R ugo+rw htdocs/
      • For some reason, the .htaccess was not readable or writable. You need writable for the permalinks to work
    • Log back in to MySQL and update siteurl & home:
      UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='http://52.59.227.153' WHERE option_name='siteurl';
      UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='http://52.59.227.153' WHERE option_name='home';
  • Browse to http://52.59.227.153/ and verify all’s well
    • If it isn’t, login to http://52.59.227.153/wp-admin/