Terraform-AWS-Project

Deploy simple node-express app to AWS ECS using Fargate

Pre requisites

• This project uses route53 so you need to own your own domain and provide it's value in the terraform.tfvars
• you need to create terraform.tfvars file in each environment directory and provide your own actual values (more explanation on this in the variables section)
• terraform installed (explained in the getting started section)
• AWS account (this project uses free tier eligible resources)

Project Description

• This is a basic terraform project that spins up a simple dockerized nodejs-express app on multiple environments using ECS service on Fargate.
• The infrastructure was developed using Terraform modules on AWS.
• the project is configured to use Route53 for DNS and an application load balancer to route traffic and forward requests from the load balancer to the ECS service.

Getting Started

• To get started with the project, you'll need to clone it to your machine using the following command:

• git clone https://github.com/Romarionijim/Terraform-AWS-project.git

• after cloning the project you need to install Terraform:

  • MacOS (HomeBrew):
    • brew tap hashicorp/tap
    • brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform
    • brew update
    • brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/terraform
  • Windows via Chocolatey (make sure you have Chocolatey installed):
    • choco install terraform

• Validate the installation by running:

  • terraform -help
  • you should be able to see the terraform commands

• Initialize Terraform, open your terminal where the project is located at and type:

  • terraform init

• Since there are 3 different environments directories - in order to spin up one or more environment you need to cd to the relevant environment dir (dev, staging or prod) and run terraform init.

Remote Backend

• In this project you can have a remote backend using S3 and DynamoDB
• In each environment directory you a backend.tf file
• In order to initialize the remote backend - cd to the relevant environment that you wanna spin up
• open the backend.tf file and uncomment the code
• open terminal and type terraform init and enter - this will create the remote backend for you on s3 to manage terraform state remotely using dynamodb for locking mechanism

Variable values (terraform.tfvars)

• The actual values that are configured in this project that are stored in the terraform.tfvars file are part of gitignore since they store sensitive actual values.
• in order for this project to work and spin up the app on ECS using terraform - you need to provide your own AWS actual values based on the variable names that are provided in the variable.tf configurations.
• in order to do that - you need to create a terraform.tfvars file in each environment directory and provide your actual values in AWS.

Applying resources and spinning up environments

• To sping up a specific environment - you need to cd to the envrionment directory (and after running terraform init as written in the getting started section) you need to tpy the following commands in the terminal:
  • terraform plan (you'll see the end result of what is declared in the config and validate that everything is planned accordinly)
  • terraform apply -auto-approve

Destroy resources

• after applying resources and spinning up environments - DON'T forget to destory all the resources in order to not get billed for exceeding the use of certain recourses by running the following command in the terminal:
• terraform destroy -auto-approve