How I Deployed a Dockerized App to AWS Using Terraform and GitHub Actions

#aws #devops #terraform #cicd

As a DevOps and cloud enthusiast, I wanted to go beyond theoretical knowledge and create something real. In this post, I’ll walk through how I provisioned infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and deployed a Dockerized app using GitHub Actions CI/CD. This project helped me apply core DevOps practices and build a production-ready pipeline from scratch.

🛠️ Stack Overview

Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
EC2 for hosting the app
Docker to containerize the application
GitHub Actions for CI/CD
SCP + SSH for deployment automation

1️⃣ Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

I started by defining all infrastructure in Terraform to make deployments consistent and version-controlled. The configuration included:

An EC2 instance with a public IP
A security group allowing SSH (22), HTTP (80), and app port (4000)
Optional Elastic Load Balancer for scalability

With reusable modules, I was able to spin up the entire environment with:

terraform init
terraform apply

2️⃣ Dockerizing the App

I deployed a simple Node.js app and containerized it using the following Dockerfile:

FROM node:18-alpine
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN npm install
EXPOSE 4000
CMD ["node", "app.js"]

Containerization ensured consistent behavior across dev and prod.

3️⃣ CI/CD with GitHub Actions

To automate deployment, I set up a GitHub Actions pipeline triggered on every push to main. It:

SSHs into the EC2 instance
Sends code using scp
Builds and runs a Docker container remotely

Here’s a simplified snippet of the deploy.yml workflow:

name: Deploy to EC2

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Set up SSH
        run: |
          echo "${{ secrets.EC2_SSH_KEY }}" > key.pem
          chmod 600 key.pem

      - name: Deploy App
        run: |
          scp -i key.pem -r . ubuntu@${{ secrets.EC2_HOST }}:/home/ubuntu/app
          ssh -i key.pem ubuntu@${{ secrets.EC2_HOST }} '
            cd app &&
            docker build -t myapp . &&
            docker stop myapp || true &&
            docker rm myapp || true &&
            docker run -d -p 4000:4000 --name myapp myapp

All secrets like the SSH key and host IP are stored securely in GitHub.