Foundry Hosting on AWS Free Tier

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 19:05:00 +0000

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

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

Vtt on Wingate365

Foundry Hosting on AWS Free Tier

Get Foundry

Sign up for AWS

Setup Foundry on an AWS Free Tier EC2 Instance