Push image to AWS ECR and deploy to AWS ECS

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Overview

This guide has two phases:

Building and pushing a Docker image to AWS ECR
Deploying the new Docker image to an existing AWS ECS service

This project includes a simple Dockerfile. Visit the Creating a custom image manually page for more information.

Prerequisites

1. Use Terraform to create AWS resources

Several AWS resources are required to build and deploy the application in this guide. CircleCI provides several Terraform scripts to create these resources. To use these scripts, follow the steps below.

Create an AWS account.
Install Terraform.
Clone the sample project and go to its root directory.
Update ~/terraform_setup/terraform.tfvars with real values for the AWS variables. For more details, see the Configure CircleCI environment variables section below.
Create the AWS resources by running the following commands.

cd terraform_setup
terraform init
terraform plan  # review the plan
terraform apply  # apply the plan and create AWS resources

You can destroy most AWS resources by running terraform destroy. If any resources remain, check the AWS Management Console, particularly the ECS, CloudFormation and VPC pages. If apply fails, check that the user has permissions for EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, and IAM services.

2. Configure CircleCI environment variables

In the CircleCI application, set the following project environment variables.

Variable	Description
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Security credentials for AWS.
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Security credentials for AWS.
AWS_REGION	Used by the AWS CLI.
AWS_ACCOUNT_ID	Required for deployment. Find your AWS Account ID.
AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX	Prefix for some required AWS resources. Should correspond to the value of `aws_resource_prefix` in `terraform_setup/terraform.tfvars`.
AWS_ECR_REGISTRY_ID	The 12 digit AWS id associated with the ECR account.

Configuration walkthrough

Every CircleCI project requires a configuration file called .circleci/config.yml. Follow the steps below to create a complete config.yml file.

The sample project described in this section makes use of the CircleCI AWS-ECR and AWS-ECS orbs, which can be found in the CircleCI developer hub using the following links:

Notice the orbs are versioned with tags, for example, aws-ecr: circleci/aws-ecr@x.y.z. If you copy paste any examples you will need to edit x.y.z to specify a version. You can find the available versions listed on the individual orb pages in the CircleCI Orbs Registry.

1. Build and push the Docker image to AWS ECR

The build-and-push-image job builds a Docker image from a Dockerfile in the default location (that is, the root of the checkout directory) and pushes it to the specified ECR repository.

version: 2.1

orbs:
  aws-ecr: circleci/aws-ecr@x.y.z
  aws-ecs: circleci/aws-ecs@0x.y.z

workflows:
  build-and-deploy:
    jobs:
      - aws-ecr/build-and-push-image:
          repo: "${AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX}"
          tag: "${CIRCLE_SHA1}"

2. Deploy the new Docker image to an existing AWS ECS service

The deploy-service-update job of the AWS-ECS orb creates a new task definition that is based on the current task definition, but with the new Docker image specified in the task definition’s container definitions, and deploys the new task definition to the specified ECS service. If you would like more information about the CircleCI AWS-ECS orb, go to the CircleCI AWS-ECS orb page on the developer hub.

The deploy-service-update job depends on build-and-push-image because of the requires key.

version: 2.1

orbs:
  aws-ecr: circleci/aws-ecr@x.y.z
  aws-ecs: circleci/aws-ecs@0x.y.z

workflows:
  build-and-deploy:
    jobs:
      - aws-ecr/build-and-push-image:
          repo: "${AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX}"
          tag: "${CIRCLE_SHA1}"
      - aws-ecs/deploy-service-update:
          requires:
            - aws-ecr/build-and-push-image # only run this job once aws-ecr/build-and-push-image has completed
          family: "${AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX}-service"
          cluster: "${AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX}-cluster"
          container-image-name-updates: "container=${AWS_RESOURCE_NAME_PREFIX}-service,tag=${CIRCLE_SHA1}"

Note the use of Workflows to define job run order/concurrency. See the Using Workflows to Orchestrate Jobs page for more information.

Push image to AWS ECR and deploy to AWS ECS

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