Deploying to AWS Lightsail with a Docker image from ECR

Lightsail is a good home for a single small container: flat pricing, bandwidth included, and none of the VPC/security-group ceremony of EC2. The one rough edge is pulling a private image from Amazon ECR , because a standard Lightsail instance can't authenticate to ECR the way EC2 can. This post walks the whole path. The pipeline we're building: docker build ──push──> ECR (private repo) ──pull──> Lightsail instance ──run──> container What you'll need An AWS account and the AWS CLI installed locally. Docker installed locally (to build) and on the Lightsail box (to run). A Dockerfile that produces a runnable image. If you're deploying a Next.js app, a standalone output image works well. 1. Create the ECR repository ECR is a private Docker registry. Create one repository per image: aws ecr create-repository \ --repository-name project-name \ --region us-east-1 Note the repositoryUri in the output — it looks like: <account-id>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/project-name You'll use that URI everywhere below. Export it to save typing: export ECR_URI = <account-id>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/project-name export AWS_REGION = us-east-1 2. Build the image locally First, the Dockerfile . This is a multi-stage build for a Next.js app using output: "standalone" — the first stage installs dependencies and builds, the second copies only the traced runtime files into a slim image that runs as a non-root user: FROM node:24-alpine AS builder WORKDIR /app COPY package*.json ./ RUN npm ci COPY . . RUN npm run build FROM node:24-alpine WORKDIR /app ENV NODE_ENV=production ENV PORT=3000 ENV HOSTNAME=0.0.0.0 # Standalone output ships only the traced files needed to run the server. # public and .next/static are not included by default and must be copied in. # --chown makes the files writable by the non-root user so Next.js can write # its runtime cache to /app/.next/cache. COPY --from=builder --chown=node:node /app/public ./public COPY --from=builder --chown=node:node /app/.next/stand