Cloudron on Amazon Lightsail

Amazon recently launched a new virtual private server offering called Amazon Lightsail. It is positioned to compete with other VPS providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr or Scaleway to name a few.

Instances start from $5 per month and come with static IP address support free of charge. Additionally there is a DNS management interface, which is using the Route53 as the underlying technology. The new offering comes outside the common AWS console, in a much more clean and simplistic appearance. There is no need to dive into security groups, vpc setup or complex firewall settings.

Getting Started

Since Lighsail accounts plugs nicely into other AWS services like S3 and Route53, which are well supported with Cloudron, it is a great way to get started with your own Cloudron installation, being able to install all apps from our Cloudron store in a few minutes.

The minimum requirement for Cloudron is 1GB main memory, make sure to select a server model with at least 1GB.

Cloudron is based on a server running pristine Ubuntu 16.04, so after creating an account at Amazon Lightsaila new server instance has to be created with that specific base OS:

Unless there is already a default SSH key available, a new one can be uploaded for later use while creating an instance.

Once the server is ready, a static ip address may be assigned in the Networking tab by clicking the corresponding button:

It will get automatically assigned and is recommended to be used with Cloudron to make the DNS setup simple.

The final step prior to install Cloudron on the fresh server, is to adjust the default firewall settings, since the Cloudron will manage them on its own. Make sure the firewall settings appear like this:

Cloudron Installation

From here on the regular self-hosting installation instructions apply, using the --provider generic flag, or just follow the few steps below and dive into the detailed instructions, while the installation is ongoing.

The quickest way to get to a working Cloudron installation, is by creating a wildcard DNS recordpointing to the static ip of your Lightsail instance.

Then login to your new Lightsail server instance via ssh, make yourself root...

$ ssh -i <yoursshkey> ubuntu@<yourstaticip>

sudo su

and run the Cloudron installer:

wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup
chmod +x cloudron-setup
./cloudron-setup --provider lightsail

The setup script will take several minutes to finish and will display the Cloudron admin interface url at the end, allowing to create the initial adminstrator account.