Readme.md

Hoist: Terraform Tutorial Pt 2

Introduction

Now that I've gone through the introductary tutorials in the official Terraform documentation, it's time to jump back in to class with Mastermndio!

Prerequisite

• GitHub (or similar) account
• Comfortable on the command line
• AWS knowledge
• AWS account and IAM role with appropriate permissions

Use Case

• Create and manage configuration files that describe to Terraform the resourses needed to run your apps

Cloud Research

We're going to create a new repo in GitHub, then create a Terraform configuration file to define our resources in.

Try yourself

Step 1 - Create repo on GitHub and pull to remote

• Create a new repository
• git clone to your chosen repository on your machine

Step 2 - Create a *.tf file to add config for AWS provider

• For this tutorial I created infrastructure.tf in the project repo
• Set up the provider as AWS, as in the docs
• terraform init to install dependencies
• terraform fmt and terraform validate to check formatting and if configuration is valid code
• Commit these changes to the GitHub repo

Step 3 — Provision an S3 bucket

Rather than doing this in the AWS console, we're going to do it in terraform!

• Search docs, this is what I found.

• Starting with the "Private bucket with tags" code example:

  • modify (acl to "public-read")
  • the second parameter in "resource" is the name Terraform refers to the bucket as - in this case, "website_bucket"
  • add tags if you want, but that's optional
  • Check formatting and validation as before
  • Run with terraform apply, and check AWS S3 console to see if it works!
  • If you run terraform apply again without any changes, note how Terraform states Refreshing state... and displays how it didn't add, hcange or destroy resources.

Step 4 — Ensure the bucket is configured to serve websites

• In the official docs the next code block is related to static hosting. Integrate this into what you've already got in the infrastructure.tf file.
• Formate and validate (no file called policy.json exists)
• Find an example of an S3 static website hosting policy, paste and modify in a new file called policy.json
• Run terraform apply and check proposed changes
• Drag and drop website files to S3 bucket in AWS console

Step 5 - Configure 2 EC2 instances

Our requirements:

• Name: hoist-internal-development

• Size: t2.micro

• OS: ubuntu 18.04

• We need to log in so make sure it uses the IAM key pair

• Check aws_usage in Terraform docs, copy and paste what you need into your already existing code

• As for the parameters, rename the 'name', select the free t2.micro for 'instance type', and for "ami", go through EC2 in the console as if you were setting up an EC2 instance, in order to see what the AMI codes are...

• In the EC2 console, create a key pair, download the .pem file to the root of this project's repo and refer to it like this: "key_name = "<key name>"
• Check everything as before, then apply
• But we need to create two instances! Add count = 2 to the EC2 resource code block

# aws_instance.developmentServer[0] will be created
  + resource "aws_instance" "developmentServer" {
      + ami                          = "ami-0ac73f33a1888c64a"
      + arn                          = (known after apply)
      + associate_public_ip_address  = (known after apply)

...

# aws_instance.developmentServer[1] will be created
  + resource "aws_instance" "developmentServer" {
      + ami                          = "ami-0ac73f33a1888c64a"
      + arn                          = (known after apply)
      + associate_public_ip_address  = (known after apply)

etc

Step 6 - Destroy resourses

• Run terraform destroy

☁️ Cloud Outcome

With a bit of docs and copying and pasting, you can easily provision, update, and destroy infrastructure!

Next Steps

Do part 3 of the course!

Social Proof

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