This is a quick, repeatable terraform to create an EC2 instance on AWS with docker, secured to be only accessible by you. There are a few simple steps to get this running. The process assumes you have an AWS account.
- Clone the repo to a local directory on your machine
- Go to the root of that directory
- Create a new ssh key called n8n. If you want it to be called something else, you need to update the key name in the variables.tf file. The command on a mac is
ssh-keygen -f n8n -N "" - Create a new elastic ip address to use. Make a not of the eip allocation id.
- Edit the variables.tf file:
- KEYNAME is the name of your ssh key
- REGION is the region you want to install this to
- AZ is the availability zone you want to use
- IPADDRESS is the address you got for the elastic ip
- ELASTICIPALLOC is the allocation id for the elastic ip
- DOCKERCOMPOSEFILE is the name of the docker compose file to use. When you first set this up, using the staging file. After you see things working, switch over to
n8n.docker-compose.yaml. LetsEncrypt has rate limiting and you easily get to a point where they lock you out for a week. - DOMAIN is your domain name
- SUBDOMAIN to your subdomain
- BASICAUTHUSER is the username you want to use for basic auth
- BASICAUTHPASSWORD is the password you want to use for basic auth
- EMAIL is the email address you want to associate with your SSL certificate. note if you prefer, you can specify all of these as environment variables. If you go this route, then preface each of them with TF_VAR_. So DOMAIN would be TF_VAR_DOMAIN.
- Run
terraform initto initialize terraform - Run
terraform applyto deploy the application - If everything worked you will get an ssh command at the end to log you in. Run that.
- Look for a
provisioncompletefile in the ec2-user home directory. That says everything is ready to go. - Run
docker-compose up -dto start n8n. - Hopefully it worked. If you get an error, wait another few minutes