Josh Nock

So in the previous post on ownCloud we launched the EC2 instance and made some DNS changes to build our own private dropbox at a fraction of the price….  but… it left us with this UGLY landing page.

And I’d prefer it to look like this when I go to the site.

So lets fix this…

First you need to download Putty, which is a very nice SSH client, or you can use the SSH client that amazon lets you run in the browser.

Grab the installer and just use the default settings.

Next make sure you download your key pair from Amazon.  After you have your key and putty installed follow amazons instructions for converting the key and using putty.

Once you have successfully logged into you EC2 instance, we’ll need to navigate to the apache directory and change the default configuration.

First change directories.

: cd /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/

Next edit the httpd.conf file.

: pico httpd.conf file

It should look something like this (also you can use the command ‘ls’ to list the contents of the current directory)

Navigate down to the line that shows document root.

Here you can see I commented out the original line and added “org:” to the front of it.  (noob tip: The # symbol is what comments out the line, and tells apache to ignore)  Changing ‘DocumentRoot’ changes the default directory for apache.

There is also a second line to modify just a little bit further down (2 x PgDn)…

Now to save the file, it’s ctrl+O (“Write Out”), it will prompt you for the filename, in which it will already be shown.  Hit enter and the file will save.  Then it’s ctrl-X to exit the pico editor.

Now we need to restart apache for the change to take effect and there is a shell script that performs this for us.  To restart apache use the following command:

: sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

if there is anything wrong with the httpd.conf file then it most likely will stop the process and write out the error to the screen.

Otherwise you should see this.

Now when you go to the default landing page for your EC2 instance you should see your login screen.

Aaaahhhh so much more cleaner!