Quick and Dirty PHP website hosting (with PHP support) using Aws Lambda (i.e. pay by requests instead of paying a fixed monthly hosting fees).
Remember the good old days when you used to FTP your PHP files, static HTML files, css files to a web server? Now you can do that using AWS Lambda with LambdaPHP!
Any files you put inside the public directory will be accessible as if they were hosted on an Apache server with
mod_php. There are no handlers to write or config files to maintain. For example if you have two files, index.php
and deep/other.php inside your public folder, by just typing lambdaphp deploy you can deploy them online at https://yourdomain.com/index.php, https://yourdomain.com/deep/other.php, etc.
Difference is you don't have to pay any monthly hosting fees because they're running on AWS Lambda which means you are billed only by the number of requests. This includes 1 million free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month (details here).
Installation is simple. All you need is PHP 7+ with composer
To install, just type this on your command line (terminal)
composer create-project lambdaphp/lambdaphp <project-name>
This should create a project-name directory inside which there is a public directory. Any files,
including any PHP files you put in the public directory can be accessed directly from your web browser.
Once your are done putting files in the public folder, just type this on your command line to
deploy your site on AWS Lambda:
lambdaphp deploy -v
You may need to enter your AWS credentials as described here (same as aws-cli).
If everything goes as expected, you should see this message:
Website deployed!
To access your site visit:
https://XXXX.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/web/<any-file-in-public-folder><.php|css|js|etc>
(If you get a "command not found" error, make sure you have ./vendor/bin in your PATH)
That's it! LambdaPHP will give you the URL using which you can access your site just like any other site hosted on Apache. It is possible to use your own custom domains with https too (details here).
file_get_contents, file_put_contents, etc works seamlessly with AWS S3 (using S3 stream wrapping) Sessions and works right out of the box! (DynamoDB session wrapper under the hood)Static site
Handling POST data
Creating sessions using AWS DynamoDB
File IO on AWS lambda (using S3 wrapper)
Simple File uploader to AWS S3
User signup and login using AWS Cognito
Using Custom domains with https support
Which PHP version will my site be running?
Currently it supports PHP 7.2.
Is it really free to host my site this way?
Yes you get 1 million free requests per month and and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. Currently lambdaphp runs very fast with 128MB RAM and has an average response time is 400ms. So using the pricing calculator here, you can process about 1,000,000 (1M) requests per month free of cost. YMMV. Also remember every assets on your page creates a new request, so factor that in and bundle them together using Webpack.
How do I update my site?
Just run lambdaphp deploy again!
My site is loading slowly?
The average load time is 500ms (via pingdom). Use Webpack to reduce the number of requests per page (bundle CSS, JS, Font files, etc into a single js file). This will also make sure to reduce the number of requests per load helping you stretch your 1M requests even more.
How much traffic can this handle?
Theoretically speaking AWS Lambda scales very well so it should be able to handle a lot of traffic easily. It performs better with more traffic since that reduces the load time. But for anything above 20M requests / mo, you'll be missing the point of this whole thing because you can get a dedicated instance for $10/mo anyway ;)
How do I add X PHP extension?
I've currently compiled php using the most popular PHP extensions. If you need to a custom extension, just using the Dockerfile in Robert's project below.
What's the point of it anyway?
It's a quick and dirty way to get simple PHP website online without paying any monthly hosting fees. Also a great resource if you wish to learn Amazon's amazing services like API Gateway, AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Cognito (which work together under the hood of lambdaphp) for your own sites.
Please star this project or comment on hacker news show your interest. This was just a weekend project for my own amusement but I will definitely add more features and examples if there is interest! :)