Posted on May 15 • Edited on Jun 11

How I Deployed a Dockerized App to AWS Using Terraform and GitHub Actions

As a DevOps and cloud enthusiast, I wanted to go beyond theoretical knowledge and create something real. In this post, I’ll walk through how I provisioned infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and deployed a Dockerized app using GitHub Actions CI/CD. This project helped me apply core DevOps practices and build a production-ready pipeline from scratch.

🛠️ Stack Overview

Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
EC2 for hosting the app
Docker to containerize the application
GitHub Actions for CI/CD
SCP + SSH for deployment automation

1️⃣ Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

I started by defining all infrastructure in Terraform to make deployments consistent and version-controlled. The configuration included:

An EC2 instance with a public IP
A security group allowing SSH (22), HTTP (80), and app port (4000)
Optional Elastic Load Balancer for scalability

With reusable modules, I was able to spin up the entire environment with:

terraform init terraform apply

2️⃣ Dockerizing the App

I deployed a simple Node.js app and containerized it using the following Dockerfile:

FROM node:18-alpine WORKDIR /app COPY . . RUN npm install EXPOSE 4000 CMD ["node", "app.js"]

Containerization ensured consistent behavior across dev and prod.

3️⃣ CI/CD with GitHub Actions

To automate deployment, I set up a GitHub Actions pipeline triggered on every push to main. It:

SSHs into the EC2 instance
Sends code using scp
Builds and runs a Docker container remotely

Here’s a simplified snippet of the deploy.yml workflow:

name: Deploy to EC2 on: push: branches: [main] jobs: deploy: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v3 - name: Set up SSH run: | echo "${{ secrets.EC2_SSH_KEY }}" > key.pem chmod 600 key.pem - name: Deploy App run: | scp -i key.pem -r . ubuntu@${{ secrets.EC2_HOST }}:/home/ubuntu/app ssh -i key.pem ubuntu@${{ secrets.EC2_HOST }} ' cd app && docker build -t myapp . && docker stop myapp || true && docker rm myapp || true && docker run -d -p 4000:4000 --name myapp myapp

All secrets like the SSH key and host IP are stored securely in GitHub.