AWS LightSail CI / CD

Prerequisites

Project on GitHub (in this tutorial I’m using the Next js application).
Server SSH private key (the key you create while creating a new instance).

Step 1 - Create GitHub Action secrets

We need 3 Action secrets AWS_USERNAME AWS_HOSTNAME AWS_PRIVATE_KEY

Navigate to the main page of the repository.
Click on the Setting Tab (top right area).
Select Action under “Secrets”
Click on the “New repository secret” button (top right area)
Set Name to “AWS_PRIVATE_KEY".
Paste the content of the server SSH private key and remove ----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY---— and ----END RSA PRIVATE KEY---—
Click on “Add secret”
follow the above point to add further “action secrets”
Set AWS_USERNAME value to your Linux users (most commonly centos, apache2) you can use whoami command to get your current user name.
Set AWS_HOSTNAME value to your server IP address.

You can also add any ENV variable as Action secrets by following the same guide above.

Step 2 - Setup Workflows

This is the part where all magic happens

Create folders in your project repository my-cool-app/.github/workflows
Set up your workflow by creating two .yml files. For the sake of simplicity, we named it build.yml and deploy.yml.

#build.yml

name: build

on:
    push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [16.x]
        # See supported Node.js release schedule at https://nodejs.org/en/about/releases/

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
      uses: actions/setup-node@v2
      with:
        node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
        cache: 'npm'
    - run: npm ci
    - run: npm run build
      env:
        NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL: ${{ secrets.NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL }}

Add env variable under env: if any.

#deploy.yml

name: deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:  

jobs:
  deploy:
      needs: [build]  # require build to pass before deploy runs
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: production

    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: SSH to Host
      env:
        AWS_PRIVATE_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_PRIVATE_KEY  }}
        AWS_HOSTNAME: ${{ secrets.AWS_HOSTNAME }}
        AWS_USERNAME : ${{ secrets.AWS_USERNAME  }}

      run: |
          echo "$AWS_PRIVATE_KEY" > private_key && chmod 600 private_key
          ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -i private_key ${AWS_USERNAME}@${AWS_HOSTNAME} '

            # 📌 Start your instance/server related tasks form here.
            # 1
            cat whereami.txt
            # 2
            bash ~/scripts/my-app-deploy.sh
          '

Tip: Create whereami.txt a file on your server to test out the connection.

You can run your .sh file stored on your LightSail server, the script will contain all the required commands to build and start your application.

#my-app-deploy.sh

pm2 stop my-app

git pull

npm install

npm run build


pm2 start my-app

echo "my-app-deploy script executed"

WTH is pm2?

it is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer.