This short guide shows how to host a Foundry instance on AWS for free (for 1 year).
Get Foundry
This bit is not free, you need to own foundry to run your games in it. Head on over to https://foundryvtt.com/ there are numerous YouTube videos explaining why it's so great. I made the jump from Roll20 to Foundry VTT and have not looked back!
Sign up for AWS
You can get a free tier account, you will need to supply some credit card details to get setup. Head over to https://aws.amazon.com/free
Setup Foundry on an AWS Free Tier EC2 Instance
Login to your new AWS account and head over to the EC2 page
- Launch a windows server instance - pick the free tier!
- Create a key pair so you can login
- Once its up and running Connect to the instance with RDP
- You will need the key pair to get the admin password
- Download and install Foundry
- Download and use nssm https://nssm.cc/ to turn Foundry into a service
- This page explains how to use nssm https://nssm.cc/usage
- The 'local files' are now located at: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\FoundryVTT
- Browse to localhost:30000 from the server and set your
- Foundry admin password! Make it a strong one
- [Optional] change the default port
Here I have done the basic setup and started to add Game Systems |
- Open the Foundry port in the windows firewall
- Open the Foundry port in the EC2 Security group, inbound rules
- Rule 1 allows the traffic to the Foundry services that is on port 30000 by default
- This you need to allow for any IP that will join - 0.0.0.0/0 means its fully open
- Rule 2 if you want to share a folder to your local machine to copy content - I suggest you just allow for the IP range of your machine, which you can pick from the dropdown
- Rule 3 is for RDP access - this rule is added automatically - if you are normal home internet, you will need to check the IP as your home IP will change from time to time
- Assign an Elastic IP Address (a static IP) to your instance in AWS - this means the external link for your instance will stay the same always
- If you are really keen set up an A record on a domain you own to point to the now static IP of your AWS instance
- Check if you can load Foundry from your local PC & let the games commence!
- An especially handy Foundry module is bellows - lets you stream music from YouTube in foundry https://github.com/casualchameleon/Bellows