AWS Instance Automation

This is the configuration I use in my website https://www.galere.se, using Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu).

System Requirements:

• Terraform v0.14.5 (Install Terraform)

Since I use AWS provider, we need the AWS CLI installed in our host machine the AWS command line interface to authenticate our account and to be able to create an EC2 Instance.

For the AWS CLI I used Linux 2.1.23 version, together with Python 3.7.3. Amazon recommends the direct download from the repository, instead of using some package mannager like apt or yum.

In my case, version 2 for Linux x86_64 architecture was downloaded, using the following commands:

$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip" && \ 
    unzip awscliv2.zip && \
    sudo ./aws/install

To check if the installation succeded, type:

$ aws --version

AWS Authentication:

Before we configure my local machine with aws-cli, we need to create an AWS Access Key and an AWS Secret Key, the former serves as an ID and the latter as an password. In this article you will be able to follow each step to generate both keys.

After you get hold of the keys, open a terminal and run the aws-cli binary, following the instructions in the prompt:

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID []: $(ENTER_YOUR_ACCESS_KEY)
AWS Secret Access Key []: $(ENTER_YOUR_SECRET_KEY)
Default region name []:
Default output format []: 

For my default region I set us-east-1 and for default output format I set None.

It is important to remember that those keys will be stored in plain text in your user home directory, under ~/.aws/credentials. Maybe is a good idea to change permissions in the folder, with sudo chmod 700 /home/$(YOUR_USER)/.aws.

Creating the Network and EC2 Instances with Terraform:

Now that our local machine have all the credential set up, we can initialize Terraform with this simple command:

$ sudo terraform init

The init command will download every plugin needed for that provider, along with a .terraform.lock.

The next step is to log you plan:

$ sudo terraform plan -out=./terraform.plan.out

This command will specify all the changes that your main.tf file will implement.

After that, we only need to type the apply command:

$ sudo terraform apply

And Terraform will do all the work.

I don't like that, what should I do?

Simple! Terraform is able to connect with your AWS account and destroy all the changes your plan has made.

$ sudo terraform destroy