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Dev Environment for RedHat

Updated Jan 24, 2021 ·

Overview​

This is an iteration of "Lab 001-DEV Environment in AWS" but this particular lab is to provision resources for RedHat labs.

For a deep dive of the different configuration files, please check out the "Lab 001".

Local environment used for this lab.

  • Windows machine/laptop
  • Visual Studio Code v1.67.2 (VSCode)
  • WSL on Visual Studio Code
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources

Pre-requisites​

  • Setup Keys and Permissions
  • Setup your Local Environment and Install Extensions
  • Configure the Credentials File
  • Install Terraform

Create a Keypair on your Terminal​

In your terminal, generate a keypair. You will use this later to connect to your instance. Make sure to name your keypair tst-keypair as this is the name of the keypair defined in the code.

 ssh-keygen -t ed25519

Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/joseeden/.ssh/id_ed25519): ~/.ssh/tst-keypair

Some sidenote: If you are using WSL2 on Windows, you could have two actual ".ssh" directory locations.

  • "/home/username/.ssh"
  • "/mnt/c/User/username/.ssh"

This could cause some issue when you try to connect your VSCode to the remote instance via SSH since VSCode will be looking for the keypair in the "/mnt/c/.." directory while your key is in "/home/username/.ssh".

As a workaround, make sure that the key is present in both directories.

A Few Reminders​

A few reminders about this automation:

  • This will provision a VPC and an EC2 instance in ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) region
  • The VPC will be assigned a "10.123.0.0/16" CIDR block
  • This will provision an EC2 instance with "t2.medium" instance type
  • The instance will automatically be assigned with a public IP during launch
  • The instance will be launched on the first availability zone of the assigned region

You can change this options by editing the terraform.tfvars. Note that if you want to launch the resources in a different region, you will need to:

  • Change the aws_region variable and specify the avail_zone in variable.tf
  • Comment out the "ami" in main.tf and uncomment the "ami = var.aws_ami" below it
  • Uncomment the variable block for "aws_ami" in the variable.tf file and specify the AMI ID in the default field

How to use this guide​

The Terraform files live in the joeden docs repo. To download only this project folder, use a sparse checkout.

git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/joseeden/joeden.git
cd joeden
git sparse-checkout set docs/048-Infrastructure-as-Code/010-Terraform/005-Projects/Lab-007-Dev-Environment-for-RedHat

Go to the Terraform project directory.

cd docs/048-Infrastructure-as-Code/010-Terraform/005-Projects/Lab-007-Dev-Environment-for-RedHat

Initialize this directory.

terraform init

If you get a "does not match configured version constraint" error, just add the "upgrade" argument.

terraform init -upgrade

Verify the formatting and check if the config files are syntactically valid.

terraform fmt 
terraform validate

Before we proceed, get your computer's IP and export it as a variable on the command line. Make sure to add the "/32" at the end.

export TF_VAR_my_ip=1.2.3.4/32

Another way to get your IP is through the terminal.

curl ipecho.net/plain

We can then pass this to the variable.

export TF_VAR_my_ip=$(curl ipecho.net/plain)

Verify.

echo $TF_VAR_my_ip

Do a preview of the changes before actually applying them. This makes sure we catch any possible error before we actually run the automation.

terraform plan

If it doesn't return any errors, apply the changes.

terraform apply -auto-approve

Outputs​

After successfully provisioning the resource, it returns a public IP. You may go to the AWS Console and verify if it's the same public IP on the EC2 instance.

Apply complete! Resources: 9 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

tst-node-1-ip = "4.5.6.7"

Remote Development​

This automation also sets up your VSCode for remote development. You will need to download the Remote-SSH extension. There shold be an additional icon for Remote-SSH in the left panel of VSCode.

Once you click it, you should see the IP of your instance there. Right-click, then "Connect to Host in New Window"

Next, click Linux.

When prompted "if you want to proceed", choose Continue.

Once connected, you should now be able to open the files in the instance through VSCode.

Cleanup​

To delete all the resources, just run the destroy command.

 terraform destroy -auto-approve