Tutorial

In this tutorial we’ll create a Wordpress server in EC2. First, create a new directory for the project. In that directory, create fabfile.py with the contents

# fabfile.py
from headintheclouds.tasks import *
from headintheclouds import ec2
from headintheclouds import ensemble
from headintheclouds import docker

Define environment variables with your EC2 credentials:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
export AWS_SSH_KEY_FILENAME=...
export AWS_KEYPAIR_NAME=...

On the command line, type

fab nodes

The nodes task lists all the running nodes you’ve created. Since we haven’t created any yet the output will look something like

ec2 name  size  ip  internal_ip  state  created


Done.

In the same directory, create a file called wordpress.yml with the contents

# wordpress.yml
wordpress:
  provider: ec2
  image: ubuntu 14.04
  size: m1.small
  containers:
    wordpress:
      image: jbfink/docker-wordpress
      ports:
        - 80

On the command line, type

fab ensemble.up:wordpress

The ensemble task figures out what needs to change in order to meet the wordpress.yml manifest. Since we don’t have any servers yet, it will (with your permission) create a new m1.small server in EC2 and install Docker. Once that’s done it will download and start the jbfink/docker-wordpress Docker container, exposing port 80.

Now if we type fab nodes again, we’ll see the new server running

ec2 name       size      ip            internal_ip    state    created
wordpress  m1.small  54.198.33.85  10.207.25.187  running  2014-03-16 17:21:41-04:00

We can see all the running docker processes with

fab -R wordpress docker.ps

This will output

[54.198.33.85] Executing task 'docker.ps'
name       ip          ports           created              image
wordpress  172.17.0.6  80:80, 22:None  2014-03-16 21:53:22  jbfink/docker-wordpress

If we open that IP (54.198.33.85 in this case) in a browser we see the Wordpress welcome page.

If we type fab ensemble.up:wordpress again, headintheclouds will realise that no changes need to be made and will just exit. We can kill the wordpress process with

fab -R wordpress docker.kill:wordpress

Now if we do fab ensemble.up:wordpress it will only run the container but it won’t start a new server.

That’s pretty much it for a super basic tutorial. Let’s kill the server

fab -R wordpress terminate

Now fab nodes will be empty again.

A more interesting Wordpress example can be found in the /examples directory.