poppulo project

Overview of solution

The hello-world web app consists of an index.jsp file that will be served by a docker container running Tomcat. The container itself will be running on a EC2 AWS instance that has Docker installed and runnnig as a daemon. index.jsp file can be found in /roles/build_app/files/hello/index.jsp on this repo

This jumpbox has been setup with the following:

• Ansible 2.9 installed
• Nessesary python modules installed e.g boto3
• Key-pair nessesary to do a git clone from github.com ( ~/.ssh/id_rsa )
• Key-pair nessesary to upload the public key to AWS used to ssh into our new EC2 instance ( ~/.ssh/pop-webapp )

Deploy Steps

1. ssh to jumpbox ( IP Address is 34.243.48.102 ) which acts as an ansible control node. The pop.pem key file will be attached in the email which will be used to log into this server. Make sure to do a chmod 0600 pop.pem for it to work if using a terminal or cli

ssh -i pop.pem [email protected]

2. Once logged onto the jumpbox, as the ec2-user do a git clone of my repo in the ec2-user home directory.

git clone [email protected]:ulankford/poppulo.git

3. Now we have you the repo cloned, we can now call Ansible playbooks to create our nessesary platform.

ansible-playbook -i ~/poppulo/ansible/hosts ~/poppulo/ansible/deploy.yml --vault-password-file ~/poppulo/ansible/group_vars/all/.vaultpass

The following tasks done here are:

• Upload a public key to AWS (this will be used to log into our new instance)
• Create a new AWS Security Group with nessesary rules needed to ssh to the server and serve http requests
• Create our new AWS EC2 instance based on a RHEL 7 image
• Write the new Public IP address of the new AWS EC2 instance to a hosts file (this will be used by the follwing playbook to ssh to his new instance and run some plays)
• Wait a period of time to make sure the SSH service of our new AWS Instance is up and running
• Finally, we build our webapp by taking the index.jsp file and creating a Java WAR file which will be imported to our Tomcat Docker image

4. The final step is to deploy the application to the newly created ec2 aws instance.

ansible-playbook -i ~/poppulo/ansible/hosts ~/poppulo/ansible/install.yml --vault-password-file ~/poppulo/ansible/group_vars/all/.vaultpass

The following tasks done here are:

• Enable the nessesary repos to install the docker rpm
• Install and Start Docker
• Copy over the newly built WAR and the Dockerfile
• Build our new Docker Image (we use a Tomcat Docker Image from docker.io)
• Run our new Image as a Docker container listening on host port 80

5. Test that one can connect to the new web app and it serves you the correct page

• First you need the public IP, which can be found on the jumpbox under:

  cat ~/poppulo/ansible/hosts

  The public IP of the EC2 instance will be under the [aws_poppulo_webapp] ansible group

• Use the Public IP address and get your browser to point to it

  http://< Public_IP_of_Instance >/hello

• Alternatively, you can use a linux tools like curl or elinks ( these are installed on the jumpbox already for your convenience ).

curl http://< Public_IP_of_Instance >/hello/

elinks http://< Public_IP_of_Instance >/hello

Note the trailing / in the curl command, with this trailing / tomcat returns a 302 redirection message

• Lastly, you can connect to the Docker container itself and view the tomcat logs

  ssh -i ~/.ssh/pop-webapp < Public_IP_of_Instance >

  sudo docker ps ( This will output the Container ID )

  sudo docker exec -it < docker_container_id > /bin/bash

  cat logs/localhost_access_log*