BitNami Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Guide

If you haven't already set up an Amazon Web Services account, you must do so in order to use the BitNami Amazon Cloud Images.

How to start a BitNami Machine Image

Amazon Management Console

1. Go to Amazon Management Console: aws.amazon.com/console
   
   
   
   
2. Sign in to the AWS Console.
   
   
   
   
3. Go to Security Groups section and update your default group. Make sure you have port 80 (HTTP) open but also you can add other ports like 22 (SSH) or 443 (HTTPS) to be able to ssh to your EC2 instance. You can add it as shown below - click Save at the end.
   
   
   
   
4. Go to the AMIs section and find all BitNami images. Select the option "Public Images" in the "Viewing" selector. Fill in the filter field with the "bitnami" string or you may also try to look for the the latest version putting the identifier shown in the BitNami download page "ami-...". There are both regular EC2 images and EBS-backed images. EBS-backed images provide persistent storage between reboots. This means you can start and stop EBS instances as needed and they will keep the data stored in them. Choose one of the images and click the right mouse button to show the list, choose Launch instance.
   
   
   
   
5. Go to Instances section.
   
   
6. The new instance will appear in the Instances section. It is in pending state. You need to wait a while.
   
   
   
   
7. At some point our instance will switch to running state. A public DNS name will then be available.
   
   
   
   
8. Please remember that you have a new action available for EBS-based instances: Stop. If you stop the instance, you will be able to start it again without losing any data.
   
9. Copy Public DNS and paste it in the new window. You should be able to see the BitNami Application start page. Click Access Bitnami [application name] link.
   
   
   
   
   
10. You can find default login and password for the application on http://bitnami.com/stack/<<stack_name>> page. In Joomla's case it is user / bitnami taken from http://bitnami.com/stack/joomla
    
    
    
    
11. Click Login and you will be presented with the BitNami application.
    
    

How can I SSH to to a BitNami AMI-based EC2 instance ?

1. Make sure that you have created an SSH key in the Key Pairs AWS Console section. Once generated, the SSH key should be saved on the disk in ~/.ssh/your_aws_key directory (Unix) or saved and converted to Putty format using the PuTTYgen tool (Windows).
2. You can login to your instance using:
   
   ssh -i ~/.ssh/your_aws_key bitnami@ec2-instance-dns-name
   
   Please remember that you cannot login as root to BitNami AMI-based instances - you need to use the bitnami account. If you want to obtain admin rights, use sudo.