Deploy to AWS using Docker compose (simple)

It’s easy.

1. Create the app
2. Create a docker-compose.yml and Dockerfile
3. Create an EC2 instance
4. Copy your project files to your EC2 instance
5. Run docker-compose on your EC2 instance, and voila!

STEP 1
First let’s make a Node.js app which connects to a MySQL database.

npm init -y
npm install express --save
npm install mysql --save

Note: If you’re using Sequelize or MongoDB etc., this tutorial still applies.

We’ve created a simple app with 3 files: database.js, index.js, and schema.sql.

Here’s the database.js. It connects to the database and handles queries.

Here’s the index.js (the Express server which handles incoming requests).

And here’s the schema.sql file, which we will run to create the database and table.

To run this server, we run this terminal command to create our database and table:

mysql -u root -p < server/schema.sql

Then this to launch our server:

node server

If we navigate to http://localhost:3000/api/1/attribute on our browser, we should see some JSON output.

Congrats! Now to Docker.

STEP 2
We need only two more files: a docker-compose.yml and Dockerfile, both in your project’s parent folder.

Here’s the docker-compose.yml:

We’re telling the docker-compose.yml file to build 2 services: ‘server’ and ‘database’.

And here’s the Dockerfile:

The ‘sleep 30’ command on line 13 makes the terminal sleep for 30 seconds. This is to ensure that MySQL is ready to listen for connections before we try to connect, otherwise a ‘ECONNREFUSED’ error will be thrown.

Connecting our database and server containers is easy. In database.js, simply change the connection object to a URL:

Line 12 shows the new connection. Your URL should look very similar to this:

mysql://root:password@database:3306/some_database

‘mysql’: required
‘root’: required
‘password’: the password which you specify in docker-compose.yml
‘database’: the name of the service you specify in docker-compose.yml
‘3306’: the default port for MySQL (leave it as 3306)
‘some_database’: the name of the database you specify in docker-compose.yml

Note that, since we won’t be able to run schema.sql inside Docker, lets move the schema.sql queries to our database.js (on line 19 above).

Now, we’re ready to spin up the Docker container. From the project directory, run:

docker-compose up

To confirm the container is running properly, navigate to http://localhost:3000/api/1/attribute in your browser to see the JSON response.

Congrats. Now to deploy.

STEP 3
After creating your AWS account, open the AWS console and then:

Click ‘EC2’

Click ‘Launch Instance’

Select the first option (Amazon Linux 2)

Select t2.micro, click Next: Configure Instance Details

Leave this unchanged. Click Next: Add Storage

Leave this unchanged. Click Next: Add Tags

Leave this unchanged. Click Next: Configure Security Group

Add a Rule and set the Type: All Traffic and Source: Anywhere, then click Review and Launch

Leave unchanged, click Launch

Select Create a new key and Download Key Pair. Save this .pem file somewhere you can access. Then click Launch Instances.

Click on the name of your instance (inside the green box, in my case ‘i-0b39c78…’)

You should see this page. Note the IPV4 Public IP on the bottom-right, you’ll need this.

Now it’s easy. Delete the node_modules folder in your project directory, then CD in to the directory where you saved your .pem file and run this command:

chmod 400 yourkeyname.pem

Replace yourkeyname.pem with the name that you set when you downloaded this file. This is a required step. Now, from the same directory, run this command:

scp -r -i yourkeyname.pem ~/path/to/your/project/folder/from/root ec2-user@18.225.7.177:~/

Replace the ‘yourkeyname.pem’ with the name that you chose when you downloaded this file, and the ~/path/to/your/project/folder/from/root with the actual path to your project folder, and the ‘18.225.7.177’ with the IPv4 Public IP from your EC2 instance page. Leave everything else the same. This will push your entire project folder to your EC2 instance.

If prompted, ‘Are you sure..’ type ‘yes’.

After your files have all copied, run this command:

ssh -i yourkeyname.pem ec2-user@18.225.7.177

Now you’re inside your remote Ubuntu computer! Run ‘ls’ to make sure your directory has been copied over.

Now run the following 5 commands:

sudo yum update
sudo yum install docker
sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.21.0/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/docker-compose > /dev/null
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose

This will install both docker and docker-compose on your EC2 instance. To start docker, simply run:

sudo service docker start

Now simply CD into your project folder on the EC2 instance, and run:

sudo docker-compose up

Congrats, your app is now deployed!