Medusa

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for Medusa. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing and choose Select, then Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of t3.medium or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login). Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet, then create or select a security group. The group must open port 22 from your management network and port 80 for the Admin dashboard and the APIs. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger.

Select Launch instance. First-boot initialization generates the administrator credentials and starts the commerce server. Allow a minute or two after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass.

Launch an instance from the SecureAnyCloud Medusa Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing, <key-name> with your EC2 key pair name, <subnet-id> with your subnet ID, and <security-group-id> with a security group that opens ports 22 and 80 as described above.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type t3.medium \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=medusa}]'

When the instance reaches the Running state and its status checks pass, note its public IP address or DNS name. Find them in the EC2 console or with aws ec2 describe-instances.

Connect over SSH using your key pair and the login user for your operating system variant. For Ubuntu 24.04, the login user is ubuntu.

ssh -i <key-name>.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>

The Medusa administrator account is unique to your instance and was generated on first boot. Read the credentials file as root.

sudo cat /root/medusa-credentials.txt

The file lists the Admin dashboard URL, the administrator email and password, and the PostgreSQL database name, user and password. Keep these credentials somewhere safe.

The built-in Medusa Admin dashboard is served on port 80 at the /app path by nginx. In a browser, go to the following address.

http://<instance-public-ip>/app

Sign in with the administrator email and password from the credentials file. You land in the Admin dashboard, the starting point for managing your store. The Inventory view lists every stock item and its on-hand quantity.

Open Products to manage your catalog. Each product has variants, prices, options and inventory, all editable from the dashboard.

Open Settings to configure regions, currencies, sales channels, API key management and the other store-wide commerce settings.

Over SSH, confirm the commerce server, PostgreSQL, Redis and the nginx proxy are active and that the ports are listening.

sudo systemctl is-active medusa postgresql redis-server nginx
sudo ss -tlnp | grep -E ':(80|9000) '

The services report active, the Medusa server listens on 127.0.0.1:9000 (loopback only), and nginx listens on port 80.

Next, call the unauthenticated health endpoint through the proxy.

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/health

The endpoint returns 200 when the server is ready.

The Admin REST API at /admin is protected by Medusa's authentication. Obtain a JSON Web Token by posting the administrator email and password to the email/password auth route. Replace the email and password with the values from your credentials file.

curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1/auth/user/emailpass \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"email":"admin@example.com","password":"your-password"}'

A successful response contains a token field. Pass that token as a bearer token to call the Admin API, for example to fetch the signed-in user.

curl http://<instance-public-ip>/admin/users/me \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

The Store REST API at /store is what your storefront calls to read products, manage carts and place orders. Point your storefront at the instance on port 80 and call /store endpoints.

Store endpoints use a publishable API key. Create one under Settings, then Publishable API Keys, in the Admin dashboard. The bare root of the server also responds, redirecting browsers to the Admin dashboard at /app.

Create more administrator accounts with the Medusa CLI from the built server directory. Run the commands on the instance over SSH.

cd /opt/medusa/app/.medusa/server
sudo -u medusa npx medusa user -e newadmin@example.com -p a-strong-password

The new user can then sign in to the Admin dashboard and obtain an API token exactly as above.

The Medusa project, the built server output and the co-located PostgreSQL data directory live on a dedicated EBS volume mounted at /opt/medusa. This keeps the commerce store off the operating system disk and lets you resize or snapshot it independently. Confirm the mount.

df -h /opt/medusa

To grow the store, expand the EBS volume in the AWS console, then grow the filesystem on the instance with sudo resize2fs on the underlying device.

The Admin dashboard and APIs are served over plain HTTP on port 80 by nginx. For production, place them behind TLS.

Obtain a certificate for your domain, for example with a managed certificate on an Application Load Balancer in front of the instance, or with Certbot installed on the instance. Then configure nginx to listen on 443 with your certificate and proxy to 127.0.0.1:9000 exactly as the bundled site does for port 80.

After adding a domain and TLS, set MEDUSA_BACKEND_URL, STORE_CORS, ADMIN_CORS and AUTH_CORS in /opt/medusa/app/.medusa/server/.env to your HTTPS origin. Restart the service with sudo systemctl restart medusa. Restrict the security group so ports 80 and 443 are reachable only from the networks that need them.

Back up the store by snapshotting the /opt/medusa EBS volume, which captures the commerce database and the application. For a logical database backup, use pg_dump against the medusa database with the credentials from the credentials file.

Apply operating system security updates with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, and reboot when a new kernel is installed. Medusa, PostgreSQL, Redis and nginx all start automatically on boot.