.htaccess

Hello,

Recently I configured SSL on Amazon EC2 instance running Apache server. In this blog I am going to explain the procedure step by step.

Step 1 : Generate CSR and submit to CA authority for verification

To generate CSR login to your server with SSH and use following command.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout YourDomain.key -out YourDomain.csr

Once you execute this command it will ask for certain inputs and based on it it will generate csr file. That you have to submit to CA authority and generate

Step 2 : Edit Inbound rules on your EC2 Instance and allow HTTPS

Login to Amazon AWS console and go to EC2 dashboard. Click on instance and edit security rules. Select HTTPs and allow it from anywhere.

Step 3 : Upload your SSL certificate and key file to EC2 using SSH

 You can use SCP command to upload crt file and pem key file to server.

scp -i "YourKey.pem" "Cert.crt" ubuntu@YourIP:/home/ubuntu/Cert.crt
scp -i "YourKey.pem" "Key.key" ubuntu@YourIP:/home/ubuntu/Key.key

Step 4 : Edit Default SSL config file and Add Certificate In File

Go to  cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

Update default-ssl.conf file by using command

sudo nano default-ssl.conf

Add following lines in file

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile      /home/ubuntu/Cert.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/ubuntu/Key.key

Save the file.

Step 5 : Enable SSL mode in Apache and set config file to default-ssl.conf

Now we have ssl config file set, we have to enable SSL mode in apache and set config file.

Use following command

sudo a2enmod ssl
sudo a2ensite default-ssl.conf
sudo service apache2 reload
sudo service apache2 restart

That's it and now you can access your web app on HTTPS. Hope this helps you.

Magento Amazon SES - Transactional Emails Not Working with SMTP Pro

Recently in one of our project, we were using Amazon SES service with SMTP pro extension in Magento 1.9. After verification of domain and sender email address, when we to test in SMTP pro, it was working fine. But when we try to send transactional emails such as new order, invoice etc. It was not working. So on debugging we found following exception.

Email address is not verified. The following identities failed the check in region US-EAST-1: hdave10@gmail.com

Now that was bit strange as that raised a question that do we have to verify all the receiver email as well and that was practically not possible as in Magento we can have any number of customers. 

So I checked docs of Amazon SES and after reading for a while I got the issue. 

The issue was we have configured three regions in Amazon SES. But we were still in sandbox mode for two regions and mail was sending from the region where we were still running in sandbox mode. 

To solve this issue log in to your Amazon SES console and select region from top left corner.

Once you select region, Go to SES Sending Limits Increase case.

and submit for limit increase. It will take a while to process your request. Once your limit is increased, you will come out of sandbox mode. You have to do this process for all the regions.

Hope this helps you.

Amazon EC2 Create Swap Space

Hello,

Recently in one of my project we have laravel application deployed on amazon ec2 instance. When running composer update command, we were facing issue of swap space as it was not defined. So in this blog I will explain how you can create swap space in your amazon ec2 instance. Please note these steps are specifically for ubuntu instance. If you are running other version of liunx, please check commands first and then use it.

1) Create swap file

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile

2) Verify it

ls -lh /swapfile

It should show following output.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.0G Apr 25 11:14 /swapfile

3) Enable it and make it accessible by only root user.

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

sudo mkswap /swapfile

sudo swapon /swapfile

That's it now you have swap space configured in your instance. 

.htaccess Doesn't Work in Amazon AWS EC2 Instance with Ubuntu

Recently I was configuring Laravel application in Amazon AWS EC2 instance which was having Ubuntu and Apache installed. The problem was htacess file was not working so Laravel routes were not working. Instead of parsing laravel routes it always shows error URL not found.

The problem is by default in apache installed on ubuntu doesn't have .htaccess enabled so first you have to manually enable it in config file and restart apache.

Here are the steps.

1) Login to your EC2 instance with SSH.

ssh -i "Yourkey.pem" ubuntu@yourpublicip

2) Enable Mode Rewrite, this is just incase if it's not enabled.

sudo a2enmod rewrite

3) Go to following directory.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available

If you use LS command here you will see following file.

000-default.conf

That's the file with default apache configuration which are applied to your sites in /var/www/html folder.

4) Open this file for editing.

sudo nano 000-default.conf

5) Add following lines after DocumentRoot /var/www/html line.

<Directory />
     Options FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/html>
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
     AllowOverride All
     Order allow,deny
     allow from all
</Directory>

6) Save the file and restart the apache.

sudo service apache2 restart

that's it and now your .htaccess file will work and your laravel application will start working.

Amazon RDS Connection Limit Exhausted

Recently in one of our project we built laravel application and deployed it on Amazon AWS and database was on Amazon RDS. In start there was no issue but after some months we had problems with database connection. After sometime laravel app could not connect to Amazon RDS.

So I checked RDS and dashboard and found out that number of database connection was beyond allowed limits. It means connection open to RDS was not closed after sometime and there were lots of half opened connections. That eventually crashing RDS sever and then connection was not established till we restart the RDS server.

So next step was to check database queries and find the queries which are taking time to execute and get data. After looking into all the queries I got the query which is taking long time to execute and that query was responsible half closed or non closed database connections and which is ultimately crashing Amazon RDS server.

So how I fixed that. Well we have a only one solution to speed up database queries and that is

INDEXING

Yes, that 's right indexing solved my issue. There was a table in my database which has 100K records and executing query from it was taking lots of time as there was no indexing. So I created an index on columns which are used mostly for querying that table and after creating index query was working blazing fast.

If you are facing the same issue, better check your database queries and optimize it with indexing to make it faster.

Laravel 5.x Store Uploaded Files to Amazon S3

Recently in one of my Laravel 5.2 project, we used Amazon s3 to store static files and user uploaded files. So here in this blog I am going to explain how to do this.

1) First of all install following plugin through composer.

composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 ~1.0

2) Now add your S3 credentials to your environment (.env file)

S3_KEY=YOUR_KEY
S3_SECRET=YOUR_SECRET
S3_REGION=YOUR_REGION
S3_BUCKET=YOUR_BUCKET

3) Open config.filesystems.php and configure s3 driver as follow.

's3' => [
            'driver' => 's3',
            'key'    => env('S3_KEY'),
            'secret' => env('S3_SECRET'),
            'region' => env('S3_REGION'),y.
            'bucket' => env('S3_BUCKET'),
        ]

4) Now open controller where you have code to manage uploaded file and add following dependency.

use Illuminate\Contracts\Filesystem\Filesystem;

5) Use following code to store your file to S3.

$image = $request->file('user_uploaded_image');
$imageFileName = time() . '.' . $image->getClientOriginalExtension();
$s3 = \Storage::disk('s3');

$filePath = '/mypath'/.$imageFileName;

$s3->put($filePath, file_get_contents($image), 'public');

$uploadedFileS3Path = 'https://'.env('S3_BUCKET').'/'.$filePath;

Please note in my case I configured S3 bucket to be direct URL of uploaded file. In case your case if you have not configured it then your path will be as follow.

$uploadedFileS3Path = 'http://s3-'.env('S3_REGION').'.amazonaws.com/'.env('S3_BUCKET').'/'.$filePath;

This path you can use to display file and you can store it to database as well.

Special Case 

If you are using it in localhost using XAMPP in your windows system. You have to do following few steps.

Download certificate pem file from this link. https://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem and store it to some where in your C drive or whatever drive you have your xampp installed.

For example I put it in  C:\code\cacert.pem

Now open your php.ini file and bottom of the file add following line.

curl.cainfo = C:\code\cacert.pem

That's it and it will work in your local environment too. Hope this helps you.