Vagrant-EC2-R

This repository shows how to use the same chef-solo-based provisioning scheme for Vagrant virtual machines and Amazon's EC2. This is useful because you'll be able to test the deployment procedures as you develop within a clean Vagrant machine. Running continuous deployment locally also saves tons of partial instance-hours, which can run into the hundreds of cents (I'm not made of money, people).

These scripts have been tested only on Mac OS X 10.7.

Development (local)

One-time setup of for local virtual machines

• Install Vagrant. (On Linux, gem install vagrant)
• Install VirtualBox 4
• Add the precise64 vagrant base image to Vagrant's local storage: vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box

Create and provision local virtual machines

After this is done, you can create the VM with Vagrant:

cd a_vagrant_machine/
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

To delete the virtual machine, run:

vagrant destroy

Production (EC2)

One-time setup of local machine for EC2

On your local machine, you will need the following:

• Do steps 1-11 from this page.
  • On Linux, instead of doing step 8, installing the EC2 command-line tools manually, they can be installed with apt-get. See the section on Linux below for more information.
  • Instead of step 12, put the following in your ~/.profile. Make sure that the JAVA_HOME is appropriate for your system; if you have a Mac, delete the line for Linux:

# Setup Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`echo $EC2_HOME/pk-*.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`echo $EC2_HOME/cert-*.pem`
export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`   # On Mac
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java  # On Ubuntu linux

• Make sure you have the JSON Ruby gem installed:

gem install --user-install json

• Create a key pair in the appropriate region. In this case the region is us-west-1, and we'll use the name test-ec2-keypair:

ec2-add-keypair --region us-west-1 test-ec2-keypair > ~/.ec2/test-ec2-keypair
chmod 600 ~/.ec2/test-ec2-keypair

After you do all these things, you will need to start a new terminal, or simply run all the export lines (that you added to your ~/.profile) from your command line.

Create and provision virtual machines on EC2

Do the following each time you want to create a virtual machine on EC2.

Go to the directory containing this project, then start up a new EC2 instance (ami-87712ac2 is a Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit server in region us-west-1):

cd vagrant-ec2-r/
ec2-run-instances ami-87712ac2 --region us-west-1 --instance-type t1.micro --key test-ec2-keypair --user-data-file bootstrap.sh

NOTE: you may need to also set the security group with --group <groupname>. The default security group might not allow any connections to the machine; you will need to at the very least allow incoming ssh connections.

Find its IP address with:

ec2-describe-instances --region us-west-1

After the machine boots up, provision it using the same recipes as the demo Vagrant machine machine:

./setup.sh <ip address> a_vagrant_machine/ ~/.ec2/test-ec2-keypair

It should print a lot of diagnostic info to the terminal. If it doesn't, wait a little while and try again.

DONE!

You can ssh into the machine:

ssh -i ~/.ec2/test-ec2-keypair ubuntu@<ip address>

This will terminate your instances when you're finished:

ec2-terminate-instances --region us-west-1 <i-instance_id>

Converting existing Vagrantfiles

Just add three lines in the provisioning section of your Vagrantfile so it looks like this:

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|

  <your provisioning here>

  require 'json'
  open('dna.json', 'w') do |f|
    chef.json[:run_list] = chef.run_list
    f.write chef.json.to_json
  end
    open('.cookbooks_path.json', 'w') do |f|
    f.puts JSON.generate([chef.cookbooks_path]
                           .flatten
                           .map{|x| File.expand_path(x)})
  end
end

Set up notes

Installing EC2 command line tools in Ubuntu Linux

The EC2 command line tools can be installed by enabling the "multiverse" repositories. In /etc/apt/sources.list, uncomment the lines that end with multiverse. For example:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse

Then run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools

Thanks

This project is based on vagrant-ec2 from Keming labs.