Custom CDK deployment of Wordle

NOTICE Application used as an example in this CDK project is a fork of: https://github.com/cwackerfuss/react-wordle

Description

This is a project built to showcase capabilities of AWS CDK and CDK Pipelines in creating easily configurable and reliable application deployment pipelines.

This project is set up like a standard Python project. The initialization process also creates a virtualenv within this project, stored under the .venv directory. To create the virtualenv it assumes that there is a python3 (or python for Windows) executable in your path with access to the venv package. If for any reason the automatic creation of the virtualenv fails, you can create the virtualenv manually.

The cdk.json file tells the CDK Toolkit how to execute the app and contains variables using during the runtime,

After the init process completes and the virtualenv is created, you can use the following step to activate your virtualenv.

$ source .venv/bin/activate

If you are a Windows platform, you would activate the virtualenv like this:

% .venv\Scripts\activate.bat

Once the virtualenv is activated, you can install the required dependencies.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

At this point you can now synthesize the CloudFormation template for this code.

$ cdk synth

To add additional dependencies, for example other CDK libraries, just add them to your setup.py file and rerun the pip install -r requirements.txt command.

Useful commands

• cdk ls list all stacks in the app
• cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template
• cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
• cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• cdk docs open CDK documentation

Deployment Steps

1. Fork the repository

2. Create Personal access token for your repository

3. Add a secret named github-secret to your AWS Account in the region you would like deployment to happen. Add your personal access token as a value.

4. Change variables account_name, repository_name and branch_name in cdk.json file to reflect your source repository.

5. Make sure you have set up your environment to be ready to authenticate to AWS via either AWS CLI or environment variables. You can read more here

6. Run cdk bootstrap in order to prepare your environment for deployment. Environment is defined as AWS Account and region pair.

cdk bootstrap

7. Deploy the initial pipeline.

cdk deploy --all

From now on anytime you commit the changes to the pipeline, it will update itself and then conduct a rolling update of the application.

Output

The application will be available via an Application load balancer called react in the same AWS account.

An example deployment would look like this.

We can apply the changes to the underlying code to change a background color and push the changes to the repo. After the rolling update would happen and application would look like that.