how to use ftp on amazon aws

Question

Today is my second day of trying to use amazon and i have started to pull my hairs. I want to set up ftp with amazon. I have signed up with them and and created an instance with amazon EC2. I have downloaded the key and I am able to login with ssh using the through Terminal in my mac. I can create files in the instance through terminal. The instance is something like following: Public DNS: ec2-xx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

I have created a index.html file at this location via terminal. But I am not able to view it in the browser using following url: ec2-xx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com/index.html I just want to create web services here which I will be using in iPhone.

Also I am not sure how to go forward. How will I get to my local files and upload them to server. In other ftps I could do it using lcd, get, put etc but these commands are not working here. can some one please help me how should I go ahead because at this moment I am just banging my head to wall. Someone please help me.

Thanks
Pankaj

Answer 1

On a related note, I encountered a strange problem where I could not FTP from a PHP script running under apache - but I could if I ran the PHP script as root from the command line. After a day of googling, I found this, which solved the problem.

Disable SELinux. (Security Enhanced Linux) The temporary solution is:

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

..which will prove the concept, but will not survive a reboot. There are plenty of resources out there that describe how to permanently disable SELinux.

Answer 2

Use scp to copy files over ssh:

scp -i key-pair-file file-to-upload ec2-user@instance-public-DNS:

Notice the colon at the end!

With plain EC2 instances, you also need to install some sort of Web server software to power your Web service, and open the HTTP port in the firewall.

Just in case you plan to write your Web service in Java, I have put together a series of articles (Part I, Part II, Part III) guiding through the basics of installing Apache Tomcat on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance.

Answer 3

EDIT 2014/11/20

Dmitry Leskov is actually the better one. You should use his approach.

Answer from 2012

You first have to setup a LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) stack on your EC2 instance to run any kind of web service.

This means you have to go trough the following steps:

• Create an EC2 instance
• Setup EBS Storage for mySQL data
• Install mySQL
• Configure mySQL
• Install Apache
• Configure Apache
• Install PHP
• Configure PHP

If you need a detailed instruction, I'd recommend you to take a look at this: Building EC2 with LAMP.

To transfer files to your EC2 instance you can use any FTP client, which supports SFTP and key pairs (you can also enable PasswordAuthentication for SSH to login with credentials). I'm using Transmit with no problems.