A brief guide to using vagrant-aws

CCHits was recently asked to move it’s media to another host, and while we were doing that we noticed that many of the Monthly shows were broken in one way or another…

Cue a massive rebuild attempt!

We already have a “ShowRunner” script, which we use with a simple Vagrant machine, and I knew you can use other hypervisor “providers”, and I used to use AWS to build the shows, so why not wrap the two parts together?

Firstly, I installed the vagrant-aws plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws

Next I amended my Vagrantfile with the vagrant-aws values mentioned in the plugin readme:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
    config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    config.vm.box = "ShowMaker"
    aws.tags = { 'Name' => 'ShowMaker' }
    config.vm.box_url = "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box"
    
    # AWS Credentials:
    aws.access_key_id = "DECAFBADDECAFBADDECAF"
    aws.secret_access_key = "DeadBeef1234567890+AbcdeFghijKlmnopqrstu"
    aws.keypair_name = "TheNameOfYourSSHKeyInTheEC2ManagementPortal"
    
    # AWS Location:
    aws.region = "us-east-1"
    aws.region_config "us-east-1", :ami => "ami-c29e1cb8" # If you pick another region, use the relevant AMI for that region
    aws.instance_type = "t2.micro" # Scale accordingly
    aws.security_groups = [ "sg-1234567" ] # Note this *MUST* be an SG ID not the name
    aws.subnet_id = "subnet-decafbad" # Pick one subnet from https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home
    
    # AWS Storage:
    aws.block_device_mapping = [{
      'DeviceName' => "/dev/sda1",
      'Ebs.VolumeSize' => 8, # Size in GB
      'Ebs.DeleteOnTermination' => true,
      'Ebs.VolumeType' => "GP2", # General performance - you might want something faster
    }]
    
    # SSH:
    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "/home/youruser/.ssh/id_rsa" # or the SSH key you've generated
    
    # /vagrant directory - thanks to https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/5401
    override.nfs.functional = false # It tries to use NFS - use RSYNC instead
  end
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "./run_setup.sh"
  config.vm.provision "shell", run: "always", path: "./run_showmaker.sh"
end

Of course, if you try to put this into your Github repo, it’s going to get pillaged and you’ll be spending lots of money on monero mining very quickly… so instead, I spotted this which you can do to separate out your credentials:

At the top of the Vagrantfile, add these two lines:

require_relative 'settings_aws.rb'
include SettingsAws

Then, replace the lines where you specify a “secret”, like this:

    aws.access_key_id = AWS_ACCESS_KEY
    aws.secret_access_key = AWS_SECRET_KEY

Lastly, create a file “settings_aws.rb” in the same path as your Vagrantfile, that looks like this:

module SettingsAws
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY = "DECAFBADDECAFBADDECAF"
    AWS_SECRET_KEY = "DeadBeef1234567890+AbcdeFghijKlmnopqrstu"
end

This file then can be omitted from your git repository using a .gitignore file.

JonTheNiceGuy

He/Him. Husband and father. Linux advocating geek. Co-Host on the AdminAdmin Podcast, occasional conference speaker.

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