4 posts tagged with "GitHub Actions"

“Branch-based sandboxing” is a revolutionary approach to development that allows teams to create isolated environments—as close as possible to production—for each feature branch. This ensures that code changes are tested under realistic conditions before being merged into the main branch, which helps avoid issues like “it works on my machine” and ensures deployment stability. The implementation described in this post covers the automatic creation of an isolated development/testing environment using the resources of an existing EC2 instance, as well as the scaling of those resources in the event of a shortage.

This guide covers:

• Automated EC2 infrastructure provisioning using Terraform
• K3s cluster installation and setup on EC2
• Cloudflare DNS management for custom domains
• GitHub Actions workflows for automated deployments and cleanup
• Monitoring and management practices

This guide shows how to deploy own Docker apps (with AdminForth as example) to Amazon EC2 instance with Docker and Terraform involving pushing images into Amazon ECR.

Needed resources:

• GitHub actions Free plan which includes 2000 minutes per month (1000 of 2-minute builds per month - more then enough for many projects, if you are not running tests). Extra builds would cost 0.008$ per minute.
• AWS account where we will auto-spawn EC2 instance. We will use t3a.small instance (2 vCPUs, 2GB RAM) which costs ~14$ per month in us-east-1 region (cheapest region). Also it will take $2 per month for EBS gp2 storage (20GB) for EC2 instance.
• Also AWS ECR will charge for $0.09 per GB of data egress traffic (from EC2 to the internet) - this needed to load docker build cache.

The setup shape:

• Build is done using IaaC approach with HashiCorp Terraform, so almoast no manual actions are needed from you. Every resource including EC2 server instance is described in code which is commited to repo.
• Docker build process is done on GitHub actions server, so EC2 server is not overloaded with builds
• Changes in infrastructure including changing server type, adding S3 Bucket, changing size of sever disk is also can be done by commiting code to repo.
• Docker images and build cache are stored on Amazon ECR
• Total build time for average commit to AdminForth app (with Vite rebuilds) is around 2 minutes.

This guide is a hackers extended addition of Deploying AdminForth to EC2 with Amazon ECR. The key difference in this post that we will not use Amazon ECR but self-host registry on EC2 itself. Automatically from terraform. And will see whether we will win something in terms of build time.

Here is more advanced snippet to deploy AdminForth to Terraform.

Here Terraform state will be stored in the cloud, so you can run this deployment from any machine including stateless CI/CD.

We will use GitHub Actions as CI/CD, but you can use any other CI/CD, for example self-hosted free WoodpeckerCI.