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Deploy your first app

This tutorial will walk you through deploying an app to your AWS account with AppPack.

📝 Prerequisites

Prior to starting this tutorial, be sure you've completed the Initial Setup tutorial and received your account approval.

You'll also need a GitHub Account.

🖥 The application

For this tutorial, we'll be deploying a simple "Hello World" Python web application from apppackio/apppack-demo-python. This will familiarize you with the app creation and deployment process prior to deploying your own apps.

🔀 Fork the repository

AppPack will need access to create webhooks for the deployment pipeline, so you must fork the repository into your own account (personal or organization). Click here to fork the repository to your account.

👷 Creating the application

Note

The app creation process requires administrator access.

From your command line run:

apppack create app python-demo

You'll be prompted with some questions about the application. You can respond as follows:

  1. cluster to install app into
    You should just have one option here (apppack) and you can select it by hitting Enter
  2. repository URL
    Type the HTTP git URL to the repo you forked above, https://github.com/<your_account>/apppack-demo-python.git
  3. branch to setup for continuous deployment
    Type the name of the branch we'll be deploying from, main
  4. custom domain to route to app
    This is optional, so leave this blank by hitting Enter
  5. path which will return a 200 status code for healthchecks
    The app only has one URL at the site root, so type / here to use that as the healthcheck endpoint
  6. add-ons
    Next, you'll be asked about enabling a number of add-ons. You can answer no to all of them. This app does not use any add-ons such as databases or S3 buckets.
  7. email addresses for users who can manage the app (comma separated) These will be the users who have access to manage the application once created. Be sure to add your own email address here and that of any collaborators.

Note

AppPack has options for logging in via third-party authentication providers such as Google or GitHub. If you choose one of these make sure the email you give access to your app is the same one registered with the provider.

🤝 Connecting GitHub to CodeBuild

The first time you setup an app from GitHub, you'll be prompted to connect AWS CodeBuild with your GitHub account. Unfortunately, doing this is a little bit awkward. You'll be directed to a page in your browser which requires scrolling down to the Source section.

CodeBuild Source section

Choose GitHub in the "Source provider" input, select "Connect using OAuth", and click the "Connect to GitHub" button. You should be presented with a popup window to confirm the connection.

CodeBuild popup window

Once you've clicked "Confirm" in that popup, you've completed the connection. You can close the browser and continue on the command line.

The app creation should take around 2 minutes to create the necessary resources at AWS. When it completes successfully you should see:

✔ created python-demo app

🔐 Login to AppPack

Now that you've created the application, you can authenticate the CLI with AppPack to start working with the app. To login, run:

apppack auth login

Tip

If you sign up for AppPack with your email address (as opposed to a third-party authentication provider), make sure you check your inbox. You should have an email with a link to verify email address. This step is required to authenticate the CLI and begin working with apps.

To verify you have access to the app, run:

apppack auth apps

You should get the following output:

=== Apps
Account: <your_aws_account> (us-east-1)
  python-demo

🛠 Triggering the first build

Now the AWS resources are prepared for your app, you need to trigger the CI/CD pipeline. Usually this is done automatically when you push new code to your repo, but in this case you'll trigger it manually.

To do that, run:

apppack -a python-demo build start --watch

This will trigger a build and track its progress in the output. You should see it go through each of the following phases:

  1. Build
  2. Test
  3. Finalize
  4. Deploy

🌐 Open the app

You should now be able to see the app in your browser by running:

apppack -a python-demo open

If you see "Hello World!" in your browser, congrats! Your first AppPack app is now running on AWS.

🏃 Next steps

Now that you've successfully installed an app pre-configured for AppPack to your cluster, you'll probably want to learn how to configure your own app for AppPack.

You should also destroy the demo app you created to avoid any unneccesary AWS charges. See How to Destroy an App for details.