Step by step how to install Deis on AWS

Posted on December 14, 2015 • 3 minutes • 452 words

Deis (pronounced DAY-iss) is an open source PaaS that makes it easy to deploy and manage applications on your own servers. Deis builds upon Docker and CoreOS to provide a lightweight PaaS with a Heroku-inspired workflow.

I struggled installing Deis and it took me several times to get it right. Deis’s documentation is correct but not very straight forward so I decided to write this to help others that struggle like me. This steps works for me as of version 1.12.2

Preparation

Install deisctl . This is needed for provision script.

$ cd ~/bin
$ curl -sSL http://deis.io/deisctl/install.sh | sh -s <latest-version-here>
$ # on CoreOS, add "sudo" to install to /opt/bin/deisctl
$ curl -sSL http://deis.io/deisctl/install.sh | sudo sh -s <latest-version-here>

Install AWS Command line interface and configure it

$ pip install awscli
$ pip install pyyaml
$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: ***************
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: ************************
Default region name [None]: us-west-1
Default output format [None]:

Generate and upload keys to AWS. Also add it to ssh-agent so that it can use during provisioning the cluster.

$ ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/deis -N '' -C deis
$ aws ec2 import-key-pair --key-name deis --public-key-material file://~/.ssh/deis.pub
$ eval `ssh-agent -s`
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/deis

If you want to use more than 3 instances (default), just export DEIS_NUM_INSTANCES

$ export DEIS_NUM_INSTANCES=5

Provision the cluster

Clone the repo, git checkout the latest tag. At repo root, run this command below to create discovery url. Forget to do this will result in etcd not configured properly.

$ make discovery-url

Next, go to folder contrib/aws/ in deis repo, create a file name cloudformation.json in order to override default values. You can take a look at the template file deis.template.json.
Run the provision script

$ cd contrib/aws
$ ./provision-aws-cluster.sh
Creating CloudFormation stack deis
{
    "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-1:69326027886:stack/deis/1e9916b0-d7ea-11e4-a0be-50d2020578e0"
}
Waiting for instances to be created...
Waiting for instances to be created... CREATE_IN_PROGRESS
Waiting for instances to pass initial health checks...
Waiting for instances to pass initial health checks...
Waiting for instances to pass initial health checks...
Instances are available:
i-5c3c91aa  203.0.113.91    m3.large        us-east-1a      running
i-403c91b6  203.0.113.20    m3.large        us-east-1a      running
i-e36fc6ee  203.0.113.31    m3.large        us-east-1b      running
Using ELB deis-DeisWebE-17PGCR3KPJC54 at deis-DeisWebE-17PGCR3KPJC54-1499385382.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com
Your Deis cluster has been successfully deployed to AWS CloudFormation and is started.
Please continue to follow the instructions in the documentation.

Install platform

$ export DEISCTL_TUNNEL=<ip-address-of-any-of-the-cluster-node>
$ deisctl config platform set sshPrivateKey=~/.ssh/deis
$ deisctl config platform set domain=deis.example.com # create a CNAME point this to the load balancer
$ deisctl install platform
$ deisctl start platform

After this, you should have a proper configured Deis cluster. Just install the client, register an account and you should be ready to deploy your very first application on Deis.