Can't get index.html to open after lamp install on Ubuntu 14 on Amazon aws server

Question

I can't believe I am struggling with this. I've set up ites on Centos but Apache on Ubuntu is so different. Running Ubuntu 14 on AWS. I want to setup joomla but I can't even get the default index.html that is included with apache2 to open! I am only going to have one website on this server. I installed all LAMP components via sudo apt-get install lamp-server^. Can someone tell me what if anything I need to do with apache2.conf, the file in sites-available and or the config file in sites-enabled?

I would have though that after the initial install of LAMP if I just entered the public address of my EC2 instance/index.html the default page would come up, but instead I get nothing.

Any help would be appreciated. I need to at least get the default index.html loading before I bother installing joomla.

I assume its something really simple that I am missing here.

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming that the lamp-server package installed correctly, everything should "Just work" and you should see the default Debian/Ubuntu apache page. On Ubuntu 14.04, the default DocumentRoot is set to /var/www/html. The file /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default is the default virtualhost controlling that. (It's sym-linked to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default - any file in the sites-enabled directory is the actual virtualhost that's created).

(I'm not sure if the lamp-server package does any extra/odd configuration form installing all those packages manually - read here to see the packages it installs).

Are your firewalls open to accept traffic from port 80? (This is usually related to AWS's security settings when you start up a server).

Lastly, I'll mention that I've gotten into the habit of installing the usual packages instead of the "catch all" lamp-server package. Here's an example of that on 12.04 (the same commands will work for 14.04). If you want to see examples of various installs in Ubuntu 14.04, check out my Vaprobash project, which has a ton of bash scripts you can copy/paste from to run commands for installing LAMP/LEMP stacks. (Warning: It uses php5-fpm over apache's usual libapache2-php5 package. If you're unsure what that means, follow the first link above I have instead of the Vaprobash project).