Description
You’ve been recently hired as a Junior DevOps Engineer for the Company FlyEasy; They developed a nodejs application and they heard about the benefits of using AWS ElasticBeanstalk.
Currently the code is stored on their Gitlab repository.
They assigned you the mission to develop a CI/CD pipeline using GitlabCI and deploy the application on ElasticBeanStalk.
Learning Objectives
- Create an AWS Account and assign the right permissions
- Create a S3 Bucket
- Create the application on ElasticBeanstalk
- Add the environment variables for GitlabCI
- Edit the CI/CD pipeline configuration file gitlab-ci.yml
- Run the pipeline
Step 1 : Create an AWS Account
We need to create an AWS account for Gitlab with the required permissions to :
– Deploy the application to ElasticBeanStalk
1. Open the IAM console, and select Add user
2.
Username : gitlabci-user
then select Programmatic access , click Next permissions
3. Add these 2 policies :
AWSElasticBeanstalkFullAccess
AmazonS3FullAccess
and click on “Next“
4. Check that you have the 2 policies attached, then select “Create user”
5. Save the Access key ID and Secret access key, we will need later to set up Gitlab.
Step 2 : Create a S3 Bucket
The S3 bucket is where we will store our artificat, it’s no more than a .zip file that we generate during the build phase in our CI/CD pipeline. We will get into more details during the CI/CD phase.
1. For now, open the S3 console and create a new bucket, name the bucket “nodejs-demo-app” and click “Create“
Step 3 : Create the application on ElasticBeanstalk
So now, that we have all the pre-requisites, let’s set up a new application on ElasticBeanstalk.
1. Open the right console for ElasticBeanstalk and select “Create a new application”
2. Name your application (in our example “nodejs-demo-app“) and click on “Create application”
ElasticBeanstalk sets up a default environment “NodejsDemoApp-env-1“, we won’t need it.
Create 2 new environments for your application “Preproduction” & “Production“
3. On the left menu, Select Applications, choose the recently created application nodejs-demo-app, then Actions > Create environment
4. Select Web server environment
5. Name the environment “Preproduction”
6. Select these options and click on Create environment
7. Repeat the same steps (3-6) to create your Production environment;
You should have both environments available at the end
Step 4 : Add the environment variables for GitlabCI
During the pipeline execution, GitlabCI generates an artificat (.zip file of your nodejs files), then it uploads the file to a S3 bucket.
We need to create some environments variables which will be used during the execution of the pipeline tasks
1. Under the Gitlab project repository, select Settings > CI/CD > and look for Variables
2. Add these variables :
– AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID (see – Step 1)
– AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY (see – Step 1)
– S3_BUCKET (value = nodejs-demo-app)
– AWS_DEFAULT_REGION the region where you deploy the application
Step 5 : Edit the CI/CD pipeline configuration file gitlab-ci.yml
This the name of the ElasticBeanstalk application we created earlier
The Preproduction name environment
The Production name environment
We declare the 3 stages for our pipeline : Build , Preproduction and Production
During the Build phase :
1. We declare the default image as alpine:latest
2. We run a script to install the package zip
3. We compress the nodejs application files
4. We save the compressed file as an artificat
During the Preproduction phase :
1. We copy the artifact (nodejs-demo-app.zip) to the S3 bucket
2. We create a new application version with the artifact
3. We update the Preproduction environment
Production:
stage: Production
script:
- aws elasticbeanstalk update-environment --environment-name $ENV_PROD --version-label v_$CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA
when: manual
During the Production phase :
– We update the Production environment with the new application version
– We set the job to be triggered manually
1. Select on the left menu, CI/CD > Pipelines, to see the list of the pipelines, Select the running pipeline
2. Check the Build and the Preproduction jobs run successfully.
Note that Production job was not executed, as we specified to run it manually.
Back to the ElasticBeanstalk console, open the Url for the preproduction environment :
It should display this webpage
As you can see it says “UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENT” , as we haven’t defined the environment variable for the application in ElasticBeanstalk.
To fix this, select the preproduction environment, on the left panel choose Configuration and Edit the Software section
Add the environment variable ENVAPP under the “Environment properties section” and click Apply.
The application configuration is updated, once finished, refresh the webpage, now it should display the right environment.
Repeat the process to add an environment variable ENVAPP for the production environment
ENVAPP = PRODUCTION
Go back to your pipeline and hit the play button to deploy the application on the production environment
