Terraform

On-demand test instances

For City team members.

You can push your local repository up to a test instance on our staging cluster on AWS. This will let you show off functionality using data from a staging snapshot of Boston.gov.

Prerequisites

• You will need Docker installed on your local machine
• Install the AWS Command Line Interface
• Get a “CLI” IAM user with an access key and secret key
• Use aws configure to log your CLI user in locally. Use us-east-1 as the default region.

Setup

To create a place to upload your code, follow the instructions in the CityOfBoston/digital-terraform repo to make a “variant” of the Boston.gov staging deployment.

Pushing local code

To push your local repository up to the cluster, run:

$ ./doit stage <variant>

Where “<variant>” is the variant name you created in CityOfBoston/digital-terraform.

This will build a container image locally and upload it to ECR. It will then update your staging ECS service to use the new code.

By default, the container startup process will initialize its MySQL database with a snapshot of the staging environment from Acquia.

After the container starts up and is healthy, the doit script will print useful URLs and then quit.

Running drush on staging

Direct SSH access is not generally available on the ECS cluster. To run drush commands on your test instance, you can visit the webconsole.php page at its domain. This will give you a shell prompt where you can run e.g. drush uli to get a login link.

The webconsole.php shell starts in docroot.

Talk to another developer to get the username and password.

Preserving the database between pushes

By default, each time you deploy code to your test instance it starts with a fresh copy of the Drupal database.

If you want to preserve state between test runs, log in to webconsole.php and run:

$  ../doit stash-db

(The .. is because webconsole.php starts in the docroot.)

This will take a snapshot of your database and upload it to S3. The next time your test instance starts up, it will start its sync from this database rather than the Acquia staging one.

To clear the stash, so that your database starts fresh on the next test instance push, use webconsole.php to run:

$ ../doit stash-db reset