Setting up a Bluesky PDS with AWS Free Tier

Setup a Ubuntu server in AWS EC2

1. Sign up for a free AWS account.
2. Login to AWS Console.
3. Select the region closest to you. Mine defaulted to Ohio.
4. Search for “EC2”.
5. Choose Launch Instance.
6. Give your instance a name, like “pds”.
7. Under “Application and OS Images” choose Ubuntu.
8. Under “Amazon Machine Image (AMI)” choose Ubuntu 22.04 (per current version of PDS README)
9. Under “Architecture” choose 64-bit (x86) to stay in the free tier.
10. Under “Instance type” choose t2.micro
11. Under “Key pair (login)” click on Create new key pair
    1. Give your key pair a name, like “pds-login”.
    2. Choose ED25519 for the key pair type.
    3. Choose .pem if you are on a Linux, macOS, or Windows with OpenSSH. If you use PuTTY on Windows, choose .ppk
    4. Click Create key pair
    5. Save the file on your machine for later use.
12. Keep Allow SSH traffic from checked.
13. Check Allow HTTPS traffic from the internet.
14. Check Allow HTTP traffic from the internet.
15. Under “Configure storage” change the number of GiB to 20 (per current version of PDS README)
16. Click Launch Instance

Setting up DNS

I have a domain (tpaulshippy.com) that is already hosted elsewhere. I would like my pds server to be at pds.tpaulshippy.com so I opened my web host and entered the following settings:

A Records

• Domain name: pds.tpaulshippy.com
  IP Address: 35.90.227.79 (the Public IPv4 address of my EC2 instance)
  TTL: 3600
• Domain name: *.pds.tpaulshippy.com
  IP Address: 35.90.227.79 (the Public IPv4 address of my EC2 instance)
  TTL: 3600

Connecting to the instance

1. Login to AWS Console.
2. Search for “EC2”.
3. Choose Instances
4. Click on your instance ID.
5. Click Connect.
6. Click SSH client.
7. Follow the instructions listed. Here’s how I do it on my mac:
   1. Open a terminal.
   2. Type cd followed by a space.
   3. Type the directory on your machine where you placed the .pem file saved earlier.
   4. Press return.
   5. Type chmod 400 "pds-login.pem"
   6. Press return.
   7. Type ssh -i "pds-login.pem" ubuntu@
   8. Paste the Public DNS name of the instance (ends in .compute.amazonaws.com)
   9. Press return.
   10. You should see a message that starts with Welcome to Ubuntu

Installer on Ubuntu 20.04

1. Connect to the instance with SSH as specified above.
2. Run the following command to download the installer: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bluesky-social/pds/main/installer.sh
3. Run the following command to run the installer: sudo bash installer.sh
4. Enter your domain. I put in “pds.tpaulshippy.com”. Press return.
5. Enter an email address. Press return.
6. Wait for the installation…
7. Setup the initial user as instructed. Save the password and use it to login.

Check installation

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#verifying-that-your-pds-is-online-and-accessible

Connect to your server

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#using-the-bluesky-app-with-your-pds

Notes

My web host did not easily allow me to add the *.pds.tpaulshippy.com DNS entry. So when I connected to my server, it showed “Invalid Handle” as my profile. But I could still browse around and see content.

I ended up switching my name servers to my domain registrar which does support wildcards on subdomains. After quite a bit of waiting for DNS propogation, I got it working.