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CI / CD pipeline for app code

The Reference Architecture also includes configuration files for setting up a CI / CD pipeline for your application code. You can find configurations for application CI / CD in the folder _ci/app-templates:

_ci/app-templates
└── scripts
    ├── build-docker-image.sh
    ├── constants.sh
    ├── deploy-docker-image.sh
    └── install.sh
  • scripts: Helper bash scripts used to drive the CI / CD pipeline.
    • constants.sh: Environment variables that are shared across all the scripts
    • install.sh: Installer script to configure the CI runtime with necessary dependencies for running the deployment scripts.
    • build-docker-image.sh: Script used by the CI runtime to build a new docker image for the application.
    • deploy-docker-image.sh: Script used by the CI runtime to deploy a prebuilt docker image for the application.

This sample pipeline configures the following workflow:

  • For any commit on any branch, build a new docker image using the commit SHA.
  • For commits to main, deploy the built image to the dev environment by updating the infrastructure-live configuration for the dev environment.
  • For release tags, deploy the built image to the stage environment by updating the infrastructure-live configuration for the stage environment.

In this guide, we will walk through how to setup the CI / CD pipeline for your application code.

Dockerize your app​

To deploy your app on ECS or EKS, you will first need to dockerize it. If you are not familiar with the basics of docker, check out our "Crash Course on Docker and Packer" from the Gruntwork Training Library.

Once your app is dockerized, make note of the path from the root of your application repo to the Dockerfile. This value will be used in your _ci/scripts/constants.sh as DOCKER_CONTEXT_PATH.

Create infrastructure code to deploy your app​

If you've already followed the previous guide How to deploy your apps into the Reference Architecture), you should already have your module defined in the infrastructure-live repository to deploy the app.

Make note of the path from the account folder to the service configuration. An example path is "dev/us-east-1/dev/services/application. These values will be used your .circleci/config.yml for DEV_DEPLOY_PATH and STAGE_DEPLOY_PATH.

Enable access to your application repo from ECS deploy runner​

Now you need to explicitly enable the ECS deploy runner to access your application repo.

Because the ECS deploy runner has defacto admin credentials to your AWS accounts, it is locked down so that users cannot deploy arbitrary code into your environments.

To allow the ECS deploy runner to start building and deploying your application:

  1. Open this file for editing: shared/us-west-2/mgmt/ecs-deploy-runner/terragrunt.hcl.
  2. Update docker_image_builder_config.allowed_repos to include the HTTPS Git URL of the application repo.
  3. Save and commit the change.
  4. Deploy the change using terragrunt apply.

Install CI / CD Configuration​

Once the branch is merged, updates to the main branch will trigger a build job in CircleCI.