Deploy to AWS ECR/ECS

This document describes how to use CircleCI to deploy to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) from Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).

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.

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.

1. Create an AWS account.
2. Install Terraform.
3. Clone the sample project and go to its root directory.
4. Update ~/terraform_setup/terraform.tfvars with real values for the AWS variables. For more details, see the Configure CircleCI environment variables section below.
5. 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

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

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

Note: The sample project described in this section makes use of the CircleCI AWS-ECR and AWS-ECS orbs, which can be found here:

• AWS-ECR
• AWS-ECS

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.

The build-and-push-image job builds a Docker image from a Dockerfile in the default location (i.e. 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}"

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: https://circleci.com/developer/orbs/orb/circleci/aws-ecs

Note 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.

• If you would like to review an example that builds, tests and pushes the Docker image to ECR and then uses the aws-ecs orb to deploy the update, go to the AWS-ECS-ECR Orbs demo page.
• If you would also like to review an example that does not use CircleCI orbs, go to the Non-Orbs AWS ECR-ECS Demo demo page.