Create a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions

While working as a team, we use EC2 as a test server. But there were two problems we faced.

We had to access the server using ssh key and git pull whenever we pushed new commits.
"It worked on my machine but..."

Guess it's the time to learn how to set up CI/CD pipeline. But first, what is CI/CD?

CI/CD is a method to frequently deliver apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development. The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. CI/CD is a solution to the problems integrating new code can cause for development and operations teams (AKA "integration hell").
source: What is CI/CD?

The pipeline makes this process seamless.

Before you begin, create an EC2 instance. Then, let's deploy a FastAPI application using docker and github action(It doesn't have to be a FastAPI application. Any backend application will be fine). There are many ways to do this. I'll show you two of them.

Automating Git Pull

Requirements

FastAPI Application
Docker
docker-compose
GitHub
AWS EC2

Dockerizing the Application

With docker-compose, you can define and run multi-container Docker applications. There are two services here.

# docker-compose.yaml
version: "3.3"
services:
  mysqldb:
    image: "mysql"
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    volumes:
      - data:/data/db
      - ./env/mysql.env:/env/mysql.env
    env_file:
      - ./env/mysql.env
  app:
    build: {the path where your Dockerfile is}
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./env/.env:/env/.env
    env_file:
      - ./env/.env
    links:
      - mysqldb
    depends_on:
      - mysqldb

volumes:
  data:

First one is MySQL database. With image: "mysql", you can pull MySQL image from docker hub, and you don't have to install MySQL in your EC2 machine. If you want to use a specific version of it, image: "mysql:{version}".

We are setting up a CI/CD pipeline. If the data in the database is lost whenever we deploy, it wouldn't be a seamless experience, right? To persist the data, use named volumes.

mysqldb:
  image: "mysql"
  ports:
    - "3306:3306"
  volumes:
    - data:/data/db
    - ./env/mysql.env:/env/mysql.env
  env_file:
    - ./env/mysql.env
...
volumes:
    data:

And the next one is your application. Make sure that build: is pointing the directory where Dockerfile is.

app:
  build: ./
  restart: always
  ports:
    - "8000:8000"
  volumes:
    - ./env/.env:/env/.env
  env_file:
    - ./env/.env
  links:
    - mysqldb
  depends_on:
    - mysqldb

Due to security issue, it is not a good idea to commit your configuration file to github. However, we still want to automate deployment job with github action. If we gitignore the configuration file, the application cannot start because it can't find and import the file.

To avoid this problem, git pull from your EC2 machine, create configuration file in the machine(with config variables) as well as in the container(empty). You can share data with the files in your container and the machine that it is running with Bind Mounts.

# Dockerfile
FROM python:3.9

WORKDIR /

ENV DOCKERIZE_VERSION v0.2.0

RUN wget https://github.com/jwilder/dockerize/releases/download/$DOCKERIZE_VERSION/dockerize-linux-amd64-$DOCKERIZE_VERSION.tar.gz \  
    && tar -C /usr/local/bin -xzvf dockerize-linux-amd64-$DOCKERIZE_VERSION.tar.gz

COPY ./requirements.txt /requirements.txt

RUN pip install --upgrade pip

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade -r /requirements.txt

COPY . .

RUN touch env/.env

RUN touch env/mysql.env

RUN chmod +x docker-entrypoint.sh

ENTRYPOINT ./docker-entrypoint.sh

EXPOSE 8000

CMD ["python", "app/main.py"]

# docker-compose.yaml
...
volumes:
    ...
  - ./env/mysql.env:/env/mysql.env
...
volumes:
  - ./env/.env:/env/.env
...

# Dockerfile
...
RUN touch env/.env # creates env file in container

RUN touch env/mysql.env # creates env file in container
...

Note that I'm trying to create development environment. Bind Mounts are not meant to be used in production.

These are my environment files in the EC2 machine.

# env/.env
JWT_ALGORITHM=****
JWT_SECRET_KEY=****
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL=mysql+pymysql://{MYSQL_USER}:{MYSQL_PASSWORD}@mysqldb:3306/{MYSQL_DATABASE}

# env/mysql.env
MYSQL_USER=****
MYSQL_PASSWORD=****
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=****
MYSQL_DATABASE=****

Since there's depends_on: mysqldb in docker-compose.yaml, it automatically build a network for the containers. Therefore we can define database url using the name defined in the docker-compose.yaml(mysqldb).

# docker-entrypoint.sh
dockerize -wait tcp://mysqldb:3306  -timeout 20s

echo "Start server"
alembic upgrade head
python /app/main.py

Creating GitHub Workflow

First, clone your repository in your EC2 machine and create env files.

Then, let's set actions secrets. In your repository, go to Settings > Secrets.

By clicking New repository secret, you can define environment variables which are using during github actions.

Add your application environment values and EC2 credentials.

And for AWS_EC2_PEM, put this.

Click set up a workflow your self and create Github workflow.

# .github/workflows/main.yml
name: CI/CD Docker

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  Integration:
    timeout-minutes: 3
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - name: Create env file
        env:
          JWT_ALGORITHM: ${{ secrets.JWT_ALGORITHM }}
          JWT_SECRET_KEY: ${{ secrets.JWT_SECRET_KEY }}
          SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL }}
          MYSQL_USER: ${{ secrets.MYSQL_USER }}
          MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.MYSQL_PASSWORD }}
          MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD }}
          MYSQL_DATABASE: ${{ secrets.MYSQL_DATABASE }}
        run: |
          mkdir env
          touch ./env/.env
          echo JWT_ALGORITHM="$JWT_ALGORITHM" >> ./env/.env
          echo JWT_SECRET_KEY="$JWT_SECRET_KEY" >> ./env/.env
          echo SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL="$SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL" >> ./env/.env
          ls -a
          cat env/.env
          touch ./env/mysql.env
          echo MYSQL_USER="$MYSQL_USER" >> ./env/mysql.env
          echo MYSQL_PASSWORD="$MYSQL_PASSWORD" >> ./env/mysql.env
          echo MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD="$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD" >> ./env/mysql.env
          echo MYSQL_DATABASE="$MYSQL_DATABASE" >> ./env/mysql.env
          ls -a
          cat env/mysql.env
        shell: bash
      - name: Start containers
        run: docker-compose up -d

  Deployment:
    needs: Integration
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Git pull
        env:
          AWS_EC2_PEM: ${{ secrets.AWS_EC2_PEM  }}
          AWS_EC2_PUBLIC_IP: ${{ secrets.AWS_EC2_PUBLIC_IP  }}
          AWS_EC2_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.AWS_EC2_USERNAME  }}
        run: |
          pwd
          echo "$AWS_EC2_PEM" > private_key && chmod 600 private_key
          ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -i private_key ${AWS_EC2_USERNAME}@${AWS_EC2_PUBLIC_IP} '
            cd {/path/to/your/project/directory} &&
            git checkout main &&
            git fetch --all &&
            git reset --hard origin/main &&
            git pull origin main &&
            docker-compose up -d --build
          '

Using GitHub Container Registry

Here, I will use GHCR(GitHub Container Registry). A container registry is a repository(or a collection of repositories), used to store container images.

Requirements

FastAPI application
Docker
AWS EC2
AWS RDS
GitHub

Dockerizing Application

This time I'm going to use RDS instead of MySQL container, so it is much more simple to dockerize the app compared to the previous one.

FROM python:3.9

WORKDIR /

COPY ./requirements.txt /requirements.txt

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade -r /requirements.txt

COPY . .

EXPOSE 8000

RUN touch .env

CMD ["python", "app/main.py"]

Creating GitHub Workflow

Generate a token for github action. Click your profile and go to Settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens.

Among scopes, select repo, workflow, and packages.

Copy the token, paste it to actions secrets, and add other secrets.

In the github repository, go to Settings > Actions > Runners, and click New self-hosted runner.

Choose the right OS of your EC2 machine, and in the machine, do as the guidance says.

Before running it using ./run.sh command, let's configure workflow file.

name: CI/CD Docker

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
env:
  DOCKER_IMAGE: ghcr.io/ninahwang/cicd_2 # this should be lower case !
  VERSION: ${{ github.sha }}

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Check out source code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set up docker buildx
        id: buildx
        uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1
      - name: Cache docker layers
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
          path: /tmp/.buildx-cache
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-buildx-${{ env.VERSION }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-buildx-
      - name: Login
        uses: docker/login-action@v1
        with:
          registry: ghcr.io
          username: ${{ github.actor }}
          password: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}
      - name: Build and push
        id: docker_build
        uses: docker/build-push-action@v2
        with:
          builder: ${{ steps.buildx.outputs.name }}
          push: ${{ github.event_name != 'pull_request' }}
          tags: ${{ env.DOCKER_IMAGE }}:${{ env.VERSION }}

  deploy:
    needs: build
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: [self-hosted]
    steps:
      - name: Login to ghcr
        uses: docker/login-action@v1
        with:
          registry: ghcr.io
          username: ${{ github.actor }}
          password: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}
      - name: Create .env file
        env:
          JWT_ALGORITHM: ${{ secrets.JWT_ALGORITHM }}
          JWT_SECRET_KEY: ${{ secrets.JWT_SECRET_KEY }}
          SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL }}
        run: |
          touch .env
          echo JWT_ALGORITHM="$JWT_ALGORITHM" >> .env
          echo JWT_SECRET_KEY="$JWT_SECRET_KEY" >> .env
          echo SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL="$SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URL" >> .env
        shell: bash
      - name: Docker run
        run: |
          docker ps -q --filter "name=cicd_2" | grep -q . && docker stop cicd_2 && docker rm -fv cicd_2
          docker run -p 8000:8000 -d -v "$(pwd)/.env:/.env" --restart always --name cicd_2 ${{ env.DOCKER_IMAGE }}:${{ env.VERSION }}