Infrastructure setup for Jenkins

Hashicorp Terraform is a Infrastructure as Code tool which is used to provision infrastructure and manage resources in any cloud or data center.

We will be using this tool to provision our Jenkins server.

⤵️ Installation

Install Terraform using Homebrew (only on MacOS):

For any other distros, please follow the setup guide in the official docs.

• First, install the HashiCorp tap, a repository of all our Homebrew packages.

brew tap hashicorp/tap

• Now, install Terraform with hashicorp/tap/terraform.

# This installs a signed binary and is automatically updated with every new official release.
brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform

• To update to the latest version of Terraform, first update Homebrew.

brew update

• Then, run the upgrade command to download and use the latest Terraform version.

brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/terraform

✅ Verify Installation

Verify that the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and listing Terraform's available subcommands.

terraform -help

• Add any subcommand to terraform -help to learn more about what it does and available options.

terraform -help plan

NOTE: If you get an error that terraform could not be found, your PATH environment variable was not set up properly. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Terraform was installed.

👍 Enable tab completion

• If you use either Bash or Zsh, you can enable tab completion for Terraform commands. To enable autocomplete, first ensure that a config file exists for your chosen shell.

# bash
touch ~/.bashrc
# zsh
touch ~/.zshrc

• Install the autocomplete package

terraform -install-autocomplete

🔧 Working with Terraform

1. Initialize Terraform This installs the required providers and other plugins for our infrastructure.

   # run in the `root` dir
   terraform init

2. Create a <filename>.tfvars using the example.tfvars template.

3. Validate the terraform configuration

   terraform validate

4. Plan the cloud infrastructure This command shows how many resources will be created, deleted or modified when we run terraform apply.

   NOTE: Remember to set your aws profile in the terminal to run the commands going forward

   export AWS_PROFILE=root
   terraform plan -var-file="<filename>.tfvars"

5. Apply the changes/updates to the infrastructure to create it

   # execute the tf plan
   # `--auto-approve` is to prevent tf from prompting you to say y/n to apply the plan
   terraform apply --auto-approve -var-file="<filename>.tfvars"

6. To destroy your infrastructure, use the command:

   terraform destroy --auto-approve -var-file="<filename>.tfvars"

🗄️ Terraform Backend

NOTE: This is the recommended best practice.

This is a storage location within AWS from where we access out .tfstate file.

All the information about the infrastructure resources are defined in the .tfstate file when we run terraform apply. So next time when we run terraform apply, it will only compare the desired state to the actual state.

If we do not use a backend to store our .tfstate file, it is stored locally on a server (if we provision our infrastructure through a server) or on our local development workstation. The .tfstate file may also contain confidential credentials. In order to avoid these problems, it is recommended to use the terraform backend to store the .tfstate file.

Now, when we run the terraform apply command, the .tfstate will be accessed through the AWS S3 bucket.

NOTE: The terraform backend does not allow the use of tfvars, so we hardcode these values in the configuration.

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket         = "tfstate-sid"
    key            = "backend/infra-jenkins.tfstate"
    region         = "us-east-1"
    dynamodb_table = "infra-state"
  }
}

🔌 Elastic IP

We will manually configure the elastic IP that we will associate and disassociate the IP with our Jenkins instance. To associate this with our doman.tld, we will also create an entry in our hosted zone for A record, which will contain the elastic IP configured in the previous step.

This will enable our EC2 instance to be associated to the manually configured elastic IP everytime we setup our infrastructure using Terrform, and disassociate the elastic IP when we tear down our Infrastructure using Terraform.