Deploy your admin backend to AWS
This tutorial is designed to assist you with a step-by-step guide to deploy the admin backend to Amazon Web Services, using EC2, ELB, ACM and Route53.
Please be sure of your agent type and version and pick the right documentation accordingly.
This is the documentation of the forest-express-sequelize
and forest-express-mongoose
Node.js agents that will soon reach end-of-support.
forest-express-sequelize
v9 and forest-express-mongoose
v9 are replaced by @forestadmin/agent
v1.
Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.
First, please ensure you have an AWS account. You can sign up here.
1. Launch an EC2 Instance:
Navigate to the EC2 dashboard and click on
Launch Instance
.Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) such as
Amazon Linux 2023 AMI
.Select
t2.micro
(part of the AWS Free Tier).Select
Proceed without a key pair
On the
Configure Security Group
step, create a new security group:allow
ssh traffic
.allow
HTTPS traffic
.allow
HTTP traffic
.
Review and launch the instance.
2. Connect to the EC2 instance:
Navigate to your EC2 instance and click on
Connect
.Leave the default parameters and click on
Connect
again.Your are now connected to your instance.
3. Set up your instance:
The command lines in this step demonstrate how to install a Node.js agent. If you are running Forest Admin on another agent, please adapt the following to your specific stack.
Update the instance:
Install Git:
Clone your repo:
Install Node.js and npm:
Navigate to your project directory and install the necessary packages:
Set up all the necessary environment variables provided by the Forest Admin environment creation wizard.
Add the
APPLICATION_PORT
environment variable to be able to contact the server from outside. In this example, we will chooseAPPLICATION_PORT=3310
. If you choose another port, please adapt the next steps accordingly.Start the agent
4. Adjust security group rules:
Navigate to your EC2 instance's security group.
Click on
Edit inbound rules
.Add a Custom TCP inbound rule to allow on port
3310
.
5. Create a target group:
In the AWS Management Console, navigate to the EC2 service.
Under "Target Groups", click
Create Target Groups
.Ensure target type is instance.
Choose HTTP to
3310
.Ensure VPC is set to the same VPC as your EC2 instance.
Setup the health checks as set to
/forest
.On the next step, select instance and click on
Include as pending below
.Finally create the target group.
6. Request a certificate using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM):
Navigate to ACM and click on
Request a certificate
.Enter your domain name and validate the domain ownership using DNS validation.
After viewing the new created certificate, click on
Create records in Route 53
.Wait for the certificate to be validated (this can take some time < 1mn).
7. Set up an Application Load Balancer (ALB):
In the AWS Management Console, navigate to the EC2 service.
Under "Load Balancers", click
Create Load Balancer
.Choose
Application Load Balancer
and follow the setup.Ensure the ALB is set to the same VPC as your EC2 instance.
Select all regions.
Remove default security group and select the group associated to the newly created instance.
Add an HTTPS listener and choose previously created target group and certificate.
After creating the ALB copy the
DNS name
.
8. Add CNAME to Route53:
Navigate to Route53 and choose your hosted zone (domain).
Create a
CNAME
record with the domain name filled in the certificate and theDNS name
of the ALB.
9. Finalize:
Check your domain. You should be able to access your Forest Admin panel environment hosted on AWS. 🎉
This is a basic setup, and there are many optimizations and security enhancements (like using RDS, tightening security groups, etc.) that can be done for a production-ready deployment. Please refer to the AWS documentation to go deeper.
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