Tutorial: Connect a WordPress website in Lightsail to an Amazon S3 bucket

Sign in to your WordPress dashboard as an administrator.

For more information, see Getting the application user name and password for your Bitnami instance in Amazon Lightsail.

Hover over Plugins in the left navigation menu, and choose Add New.

Search for WP Offload Media Lite.

In the search results, choose Install Now next to the WP Offload Media plugin.

Choose Activate after the plugin is done installing.

In the left navigation menu, choose Settings, then choose Offload Media.

In the Offload Media page, choose Amazon S3 as the storage provider, then choose Define access keys in wp-config.php.

With this option, you must add your AWS account credentials to the wp-config.php on the instance. These steps are covered later in this tutorial.

Leave the Offload Media page open; you will return to it later in this tutorial. Continue to the Step 3: Create an IAM user and policy section of this tutorial.

Open a new browser tab, and sign in to the IAM console.

In the left navigation menu, choose Users.

Choose Add user.

In the User name text box, enter a name for the new user. Enter something descriptive, such as wp_s3_user or wp_offload_media_plugin_user, so that you can easily identify it in the future when performing maintenance.

Under the Access type section, choose Programmatic access.

Choose Next: Permissions.

Choose Attach existing policies directly, search for S3, and then choose AmazonS3FullAccess in the search results.

Choose Next: Tags, and then choose Next: Review.

Review the user details displayed on the page, then choose Create user.

Make note of the access key ID and secret access key for the user, or choose Download .csv to save a copy of these values to your local drive. You will need these in the next few steps when editing the wp-config.php file on the WordPress instance.

Sign in to the Lightsail console.

Choose the browser-based SSH client icon for the WordPress instance.

In the SSH client window that appears, enter the following command to create a backup of the wp-config.php file in case something goes wrong:

sudo cp /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wp-config.php /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wp-config.php.backup

Enter the following command to open the wp-config.php file using nano, a text editor:

nano /opt/bitnami/wordpress/wp-config.php

Enter the following text above the /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ text.

Be sure to replace AccessKeyID with the access key ID and SecretAccessKey with the secret access key of the IAM user you created earlier in these steps.

define( 'AS3CF_SETTINGS', serialize( array(
    'provider' => 'aws',
    'access-key-id' => 'AccessKeyID',
    'secret-access-key' => 'SecretAccessKey',
) ) );

Example:

define( 'AS3CF_SETTINGS', serialize( array(
    'provider' => 'aws',
    'access-key-id' => 'AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE',
    'secret-access-key' => 'wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY',
) ) );

The result should look like the following example:

Press Ctrl+X to exit Nano, then press Y, and Enter to save your edits to the wp-config.php file.

Enter the following command to restart the services on the instance:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

You will see a result similar to the following when the services have restarted:

Close the SSH window and toggle back to the Offload Media page that you left open earlier in this tutorial. You are now ready to create the Amazon S3 bucket using the WP Offload Media plugin.

Refresh the Offload Media page, or choose Next.

You should now see that the Amazon S3 provider is configured.

Choose Create new bucket.

In the Region drop-down menu, choose the desired AWS Region. We recommend that you choose the same region in which your WordPress instance is located.

In the Bucket text box, enter a name for the new S3 bucket.

Choose Create New Bucket.

The page refreshes to confirm that a new bucket was created. Review the settings that appear and adjust them accordingly to how you want your WordPress website to behave.

From now on, images and attachments added to blog posts are automatically uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket that you created.