Deploy A Simple Application To AWS EC2

This piece walks you through how to automate a simple Nodejs App to AWS EC2 via GitHub Actions leveraging third-party actions on GitHub Marketplace.

To learn more about GitHub Actions and AWS EC2 check out this article.

Create Nodejs App

The basic way to set up a nodejs app is to check out NodeJS and NPM websites respectively, make a download and install. Furthermore, check out this repo to guide you through creating a nodejs app.

Spin Up EC2 With Terraform

Create a ec2.tf

terraform {
  cloud {
    organization = "arterycloud"

    workspaces {
      name = "Nautty-dev"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region  = var.region
  profile = "terraform-user"
}

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-xxxxxxxxxxxx"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  count         = 1

  tags = {
    Name = "Nautty-dev"
  }
}

variable "region" {
  default     = "us-east-1"
  description = "AWS Region"
  type        = string
}

Generate SSH key

In this case, we'll SSH into the ec2 instance and generate a key. Checkout this step to generate a new SSH Key.

• Add public Key to authorized key and the main reason for doing this is to add the (xx.pub) to authorized key so Github Actions using the private key can access the server.

Run this command to append the public key to the authorized key.

cat xxx.pub  >> authorized keys

• Add private key to repository’s secrets.

Set up Workflow to Deploy to EC2 Instance

Look at this article to learn about creating a workflow.

name: EC2 CI/CD

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "ft/week7_cicd" ]

defaults:
  run:
    working-directory: ./week7/

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [16.x]

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
      uses: actions/setup-node@v3
      with:
        node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
        cache: 'npm'
        cache-dependency-path: './week7/package-lock.json'
    - run: npm i

    - name: Deploy to EC2 instance
      uses: easingthemes/ssh-deploy@main
      env:
        SSH_PRIVATE_KEY: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
        REMOTE_HOST: ${{ secrets.REMOTE_HOST }}
        REMOTE_USER: ${{ secrets.REMOTE_USER }}
        TARGET: ${{ secrets.TARGET }}
        SOURCE: ""

    - name: Executing remote ssh commands using ssh key
      uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
      with:
        host: ${{ secrets.REMOTE_HOST }}
        username: ${{ secrets.REMOTE_USER }}
        key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
        script: |
            # sudo npm install pm2 -g && pm2 update
            cd /home/ubuntu/nautilus-devops/week7
            # sudo pm2 start index.js --name=week7 
            sudo pm2 restart week7

The code above does a few things.

• Creates a workflow named EC2 CI/CD.

• Checks out the code.

• Set up dependencies and requirements for our build, configuring cache for npm build system.

• Deploy to EC2 instance using the easingthemes/ssh-deploy action, which is a third-party action available on the GitHub marketplace, helps in deploying the code to the server using ssh and perform rsync form the runner.

• Executing remote ssh commands using appleboy/ssh-action@master.

Summary

This article helps you understand how you can automatically deploy your code to AWS EC2 from GitHub.