Description

This is a simple working example of how to deploy a container in google compute engine using terraform and docker.

Requirements

• A google project with owner access rights.
• Docker engine.

Before Start:

Create the credentials.json

• Google Console -> "APIs & services -> Credentials"
• Choose create- > "service account key" -> compute engine service account -> JSON (Download)

Build the docker image with:

$ docker build -t gce_mgmt .

The command above will generate an alpine based image which is very small (324MB). Alternatively you can build an ubuntu based image (678MB) with the follwing:

docker build -t gce_mgmt:ubuntu -f Dockerfile.ubuntu .

Run

Run the docker container, mapping the directory where the json was downloaded:

$ docker run --rm -v $HOME/downloads:/opt/downloads -it gce_mgmt

copy the json downloaded into the working directory (/gcloud) of the container (credentials.json file):

$ sudo cp /opt/downloads/project-123141.json credentials.json

load the environment variables:

$ source load-credentials.sh

If that is the first time your run this in your project, you might want to enable the google cloud apis, otherwise press any key to ignore it.

Initialize terraform:

terraform init

Deploy the example

$ terraform apply

Access the ip address shown at the terraform output and check if nginx is running. --profit.

Clean up the deployment

$ terraform destroy

Notes

You can access gce instances with the alias: sshgcp instance There are other interesting aliases you might find useful (after generating the tfstate with terraform apply:

• ansible-ti : ansible command plus terraform dynamic inventory
• ansible-tip : ansible-playbook command plus terraform dynamic inventory
• ansible-inventory-ti : ansible-inventory command plus terraform dynamic inventory

After deploying terraform, run ansible-tip sshscan.yml to load the ssh keys of remote nodes.