CircleCI Demo: AWS ECS ECR

Deploy to AWS ECS from ECR via CircleCI 2.0 using Orbs (Example Project)

This project provides an example of how to use orbs to conveniently build a Docker image on CircleCI, push the Docker image to an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), and then deploy to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) using AWS Fargate. Specifically, the aws-ecr and the aws-ecs Orbs will be used in this project.

A tutorial walkthrough is available for the project at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/ecs-ecr/

Alternative branches

• More advanced example with Orbs
• Without Orbs

Prerequisites

Set up required AWS resources

Builds of this project rely on AWS resources to be present in order to succeed. For convenience, the prerequisite AWS resources may be created using the terraform scripts procided in the terraform_setup directory.

1. Ensure terraform is installed on your system.
2. Edit terraform_setup/terraform.tfvars to fill in the necessary variable values (an Amazon account with sufficient privileges to create resources like an IAM account, VPC, EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancer, etc is required). (It is not advisable to commit this file to a public repository after it has been populated with your AWS credentials)
3. Use terraform to create the AWS resources

   cd terraform_setup
   terraform init
   # Review the plan
   terraform plan
   # Apply the plan to create the AWS resources
   terraform apply
   

4. You can run terraform destroy to destroy most of the created AWS resources but in case of lingering undeleted resources, it is recommended to check the AWS Management Console to see if there are any remaining undeleted resources to avoid unwanted costs. In particular, please check the ECS, CloudFormation and VPC pages.

Configure environment variables on CircleCI

The following environment variables must be set for the project on CircleCI via the project settings page, before the project can be built successfully.

Variable	Description
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Used by the AWS CLI
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Used by the AWS CLI
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION	Used by the AWS CLI. Example value: "us-east-1" (Please make sure the specified region is supported by the Fargate launch type)
AWS_ACCOUNT_ID	AWS account id. This information is required for deployment.
AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX	Prefix that some of the required AWS resources are assumed to have in their names. The value should correspond to the aws_resource_prefix variable value in terraform_setup/terraform.tfvars.

Useful Links & References

• https://circleci.com/orbs/registry/orb/circleci/aws-ecr
• https://circleci.com/orbs/registry/orb/circleci/aws-ecs
• https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/aws-ecr-orb
• https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/aws-ecs-orb
• https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ECS_GetStarted.html