Headless Wordpress Deployment using AWS CloudFormation

Quikly spin up a headless Wordpress deployment using AWS CloudFormation.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the recommended way to manage the cloud infrastructure that your application runs on. IaC allows you to incrementailly add/remove infrastructure as your application changes.

IaC really shines when you need to spin up a new environment. Lets say you get a huge customer who wants to be on their own instance. You can be up in running withing the hour.

This project contains 5 CloudFormation scripts. They must be created in order because they depend on each other:

1. VPC
2. ECS
3. RDS
4. ECR
5. Wordpress

Prerequisites

• AWS Account
• EC2 Key Pair
• cim - (npm install -g cim)
• AWS CLI

Stacks

VPC

This creates the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud that our ECS cluster and RDS database will run in.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

cd vpc
cim stack-up

ECS

This creates an Elastic Container Service that our EC2's will run in.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS.

cd vpc
cim stack-up

RDS

This creates a Relational Database Service database cluster that our Wordpress application will use.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

cd rds
export DatabaseUsername="???"; export DatabasePassword="???"; cim stack-up

ECR

This creates an Elastic Container Registry that will hold the docker images of our wordpress service.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a fully-managed Docker container registry that makes it easy for developers to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.

cd ecr
cim stack-up

Wordpress

Before we can launch this cloudformation stack. We need to push our service image to ECR.

Push Image

cd wordpress/src

• Registry Authentication
  • aws ecr get-login --registry-ids <account-id>
  • copy/past output to perform docker login, also append /headless-wp to the repository url.
• Build Image
  • docker build -t headless-wp:<version> .
• Push Image
  • docker tag headless-wp:<version> <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp:latest
  • docker tag headless-wp:<version> <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp:<version>
  • docker push <account-id>.dkr.ecr.<region>.amazonaws.com/headless-wp

Update Version

Make sure the Version parameter, in _cim.yml, matches the version tag from above. The ECS Task Definition will pull the image from ECR.

Stack up

Once the Version is set you can use cim stack-up to update the stack with the new version.

cd wordpress
cim stack-up

Wordpress

Congratulations, your new Wordpress site is now available.

First run through the Wordpress setup wizard.

Next enable some of the plugins we added.

Add a few blog posts and pages.

Then check out the API. Ex: https://<cdn-url>/wp-json/wp/v2/posts

Tear down

cd wordpress
cim stack-delete

cd ecr
cim stack-delete

cd rds
cim stack-delete

cd ecs
cim stack-delete

cd vpc
cim stack-delete