Whoah. It is hard times for the Linux Admin trying to get a new web server off the ground.

Amazon linux does not ship with apt-get or apt-key or any of our Ubuntu favorites. This is a RHEL model boys and girls. And RHEL means yum. And here’s the issue:

We cannot simply install NGINX. Its not in any standard Repo if your instance is fresh from the Launcher. Boo.

sudo yum install epel-release ...? 

Yeah… try again punk. Enabling the extra packages isn’t that simple. We have to go chase them down. Why this isn’t standard? Who knows… but here is the remedy: You have to go chase it down in fedora land and install the rpm file.

( I don’t think you are a punk. Im talking to myself )

sudo yum install –y https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Adding the -y is a nice way to speed things up and answer yes to all the questions beforehand.

What is the lesson here? You really should have a configuration script ready to go, or at least a preconfigured image in your AWS console when setting one of these up again.

— Next Day:

Nope! The lesson is understanding the plight of the admin short on time. I spent a good hour trying to get wordpress up and running but I got lost at the intersection of MySql and libso.03 or something…. I tried to get a handle on it and went so far as to try to install the dependencies manually but to no avail. Apparently this is still an issue:

https://serverfault.com/questions/873955/how-solve-mysql-5-7-dependency

I just need to get this thing up and running so I ran back to Ubuntu 16.04.

Whatever…