In the following notes I want to show you how to deploy Wordpress Application to AWS using Terraform, Ansible and CircleCI.

Long explanation on Medium. Coming soon...

• GitHub
• CircleCI
• AWS
• Terraform
• Ansible

This is a 30,000 feet view of the architecture we are going to implement using this tutorial.

1. A Cloud Architect design the infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible code and upload it to GitHub
2. GitHub communicates performed changes on master or destroyrepositories to CircleCI
3. CircleCI get the source code from GitHub repository and prepare a virtual machine with all required tools (AWS CLI, Terraform and Ansible), establish comunication with AWS and deploy the infrastructure described on GitHub source code repository
4. AWS receive the instructions from Terraform and Ansible of how to deploy the corresponding resources

I assume that you're going to clone this respository, work in your workstation and with your own GitHub account. You need the following tools:

• Git
• Visual Studio Code (or any other IDE or Text Editor like Atom)

Once you have Git installed in your computer you can use the following command to clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/williammunozr/terraform-ansible-aws.git

After that, remove the link to my repository:

git remote remove origin

And create your own GitHub repository. You need to follow this step to configure CircleCI.

It's good practice to manage the Terraform State and Lock on a centralized location. To accomplish this requirement we use DynamoDB and S3 Bucket.

• Create a S3 Bucket with versioning active
• Create a DynamoDB table with LockID as primary key

Adjust values on the following keys in state_config.tf file:

The full AWS configuration is outside of this tutorial. In short, we need an IAM user with access keys activated and with the following policy assigned:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "rds:*",
                "s3:*",
                "ec2:*",
                "dynamodb:*",
                "elasticloadbalancing:*",
                "iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

This policy gives the user all the permissions needed to work with this tutorial, but my recommendation is to give the least permissions as possible.

Adjust default values on the following variables in variables.tf file.

For Ansible, we are going to use Dynamic Inventory . With that in mind, set the hosts value in ansible/app.yml file to tag_NAME_App01, the value must correspond to the value you set in Terraform Variables for the entry instance_name, for this case correspond to App01.

Special Notice

In reality, this value must correspond to a tag that you set in public.tf file on line 16 for the key-value Name, what happends here, it is that I configured both values to var.instance_name

The other value that we have to configure is --db-instance-identifier on .circleci/config.yml file on line 80. This must be the same value of Terraform Variables table line 167

In order to access an AWS EC2 Instances we need to provide (create) a SSH Key to be used in the Terraform deployment process and this is also required by Ansible in the configuration management process. That's why we need to create a SSH Key, process that we're going to accomplish in this section.

In a Unix-like operating system the default location for the SSH keys is the .ssh directory within the current user's home directory. To create the a SSH key execute the following commands:

$ ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/terraform-ansible-aws
For simplicity, press enter to accept the default values.

Our last step in this section is to copy the public SSH key file to the root directory of the project and set the value of the variable named private_key_file in the ansible.cfg file to the full path of the private SSH key.

$ terraform-ansible-aws git:(master) cp -p ~/.ssh/terraform-ansible-aws.pub .

If you change the name of the SSH key (ansible_aws) for something different, you have to adjust the project accordingly.

I assume you have an AWS account and that you know the basis of AWS administration and configuration.

Coming soon...

This project is not production ready, it has some weaknesses in its design, for example, you can see the RDS username and password in the code, what is a bad practice.

This project was intended to show how to work with Terraform, Ansible and CircleCI.