16. Live Project: Building a Reels App with EC2, S3 and RDS

16.3 Server Setup: LEMP, Composer and the AWS SDK for PHP

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 27 September 2026

Database RDS var aahe, mhanun EC2 var fakt MySQL client lagto, server nahi.

Amazon Linux 2023

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y nginx php php-fpm php-cli php-mysqlnd php-mbstring php-xml mariadb105 unzip git
sudo service php-fpm start
sudo service nginx start
sudo systemctl enable nginx php-fpm
php -v && php -m | grep -Ei 'pdo_mysql|mbstring|simplexml|fileinfo'

Ubuntu

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nginx php-fpm php-cli php-mysql php-mbstring php-xml php-curl mysql-client unzip git composer
sudo service php8.3-fpm start          # use the version you see in: ls /run/php/
sudo service nginx start

Composer (the PHP package manager). On Ubuntu it came with apt above. On Amazon Linux 2023 use the official installer (see getcomposer.org/download for the current commands and the installer checksum check):

cd /tmp
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
rm composer-setup.php
composer --version

Project folder and the AWS SDK for PHP

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/reels/{src,public/assets,deploy}
sudo chown -R ec2-user:ec2-user /var/www/reels        # Ubuntu: ubuntu:ubuntu
cd /var/www/reels

composer.json

{
    "name": "ravindra/reels",
    "description": "Reels-style video and text feed – Cyber Security Study Guide project",
    "require": {
        "php": ">=8.1",
        "aws/aws-sdk-php": "^3.300"
    }
}

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader     # downloads aws/aws-sdk-php into vendor/
ls vendor/aws/aws-sdk-php                            # SDK is installed