Where to start?

Create an AWS stack

Create an AWS account with sufficient permissions to create the following resources:

• CloudFormation::Stack
• ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer
• EC2::SecurityGroup
• RDS::DBSecurityGroup
• RDS::DBInstance
• AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration
• AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup

Generate a keypair for the newly created AWS Account. Install Ruby then Install and configure aws-sdk for Ruby. The script assumes that you use environment variables to configure AWS login.

Change variable data accordingly in cloudformation/helloworld_former.rb:

parameters = [{ parameter_key: 'KeyName', parameter_value: 'NAME_OF_THE_CREATED_KEYPAIR' }, ...

Example:

parameters = [{ parameter_key: 'KeyName', parameter_value: 'mos-roshanavand-aws' }, ...

Run the helloworld_former.rb script to create a new stack.

$ cd cloudformation
$ ruby helloworld_former.rb

The stack creation usually takes about 30 minutes. meanwhile you can see the creation progress on the screen, wait until it's finished:

AWS::CloudFormation::Stack                                            CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer                               CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup                                               CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::ElasticLoadBalancing::LoadBalancer                               CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup                                               CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::RDS::DBSecurityGroup                                             CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::RDS::DBInstance                                                  CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::RDS::DBInstance                                                  CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration                                 CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration                                 CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup                                    CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
AWS::CloudFormation::Stack                                            CREATE_COMPLETE
AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup                                    CREATE_COMPLETE

When the creation is done, you will get some output:

OUTPUT DATA:
        EC2 Public DNS names, use this address to bootstrap with knife
***             ec2-54-174-207-9.compute-1.amazonaws.com
***             ec2-54-210-247-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com

        URL for newly created Rails application
***             http://HelloWorl-ElasticL-15M53DC16BDAB-865072088.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/

If you don't change the default value for WebServerCapacity parameter in the script, then you will have two outputs for EC2 instances, just like above. You'll need them to bootstrap with knife tool. The second output is the address for ElasticLoadBalancer, this address points to our 'Hello World' web page.

Apply Chef cookbooks

Creation of a ChefServer is not done by our stack creator script. I have used a chef.io account, you can use any other ways as you like.

Create a chef.io account. Install and configure chefdk and configure knife

Upload hello_world cookbook to your ChefSerer:

$ cd cookbooks/hello_world
$ berks install
$ berks upload

Use the output data from stack creation to bootstrap the nodes:

$ knife bootstrap <PUBLIC_DNS_FOR_EC2> --ssh-user ec2-user --sudo --identity-file <PATH_TO_YOUR_AWS_KEYPAIR_PEM> --run-list hello_world -N <NAME_OF_THE_NODE>

Example:

knife bootstrap ec2-54-174-207-9.compute-1.amazonaws.com --ssh-user ec2-user --sudo --identity-file mos-roshanavand-aws.pem --run-list hello_world -N hello_world_1

Run this for all the ec2 instances. (Remember to name them differently)

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Visit the application URL :)

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Test application with Selenium

Change to selenium directory and install required gems:

$ cd selenium
$ bundle install

This selenium tests will run locally using ChromeDriver by default, if you have a Selenium server you can change the settings accordingly in spec_helper.rb file. To run the tests locally you need to download and install ChromeDriver Then change the WEBSITE_URL value in spec_helper.rb file, and run the tests:

$ bundle exec rspec spec/test_login.rb