Amazon EC2 port 80 not open despite being in security group

Question

I am new to working with AWS so it's quite possible that I'm missing something simple, but here's the issue I'm having. I followed a tutorial to create an EC2 instance (t2.micro) and I have configured a security group to allow HTTP (port 80) from any source, but the port isn't open.

I can ssh into my server with no problem, and when I use a port scanning app (e.g. http://ping.eu/port-chk/), I see that port 22 is open, but port 80 isn't. When I try wget http://localhost, I get:

Connecting to localhost (localhost)|127.0.0.1|:80... failed: Connection refused. 

If this helps, here are the results from sudo netstat -plunta | grep LISTEN:

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:55171 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2334/rpc.statd tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2313/rpcbind tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2500/sshd tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2530/sendmail tcp 0 0 :::111 :::* LISTEN 2313/rpcbind tcp 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN 2500/sshd tcp 0 0 :::56605 :::* LISTEN 2334/rpc.statd 

EDIT:

I am using this EC2 instance to build a container from dockerhub. I am able to build the container locally with docker run -p 8000:8000 -t hsdetect, so I put it on dockerhub and tried to connect to it through port 80 using this: docker run -d -p 80:8000 jss367/hsdetect:new_port python app.py

Answer 1

Opening port 80 in your security group does not create a process in your EC2 instance listening on that port. You need to install an application, such as Apache, to listen on port 80.

Assuming that you want a web server running in your instance, install Apache.

Example commands:

sudo yum update -y sudo yum install -y httpd24 sudo service httpd start sudo chkconfig httpd on 

This will give you a simple Apache default installation.

Note: I am assuming your instance is Amazon Linux. The commands may be different for other distributions.