Container

Services for running docker containers in AWS ECS.

⚠️ This is one of the lesser used services in SAWS and thus may not be complete. ⚠️

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Development
• Deployment
• Services
  • ContainerService
• When used as a dependency
• Libraries

Installation

From the command line run:

npm install @saws/container

Then add the included service (ContainerService) to your saws.js file.

Development

In development, ContainerService will look for a Dockerfile in your service's directory, build it, and then run it in docker locally.

Anytime any files change in your service's directory it will automatically stop your container, rebuild the Dockerfile and then run it again.

Deployment

When you deploy a ContainerService, a number of resources will be stood up and configured for you:

• ECR repository for pushing your docker image to.
• ECS Cluster
• ECS Service with EC2 launch type (this allows you to run your container in free tier)
• Task Definition pointing to your image in ECR
• Security Group to allow inbound TCP traffic on the configured port
• EC2 instance added to your ECS cluster
• An IAM Role for the EC2 instance to have permissiont to talk to Cloudwatch logs and the ECS cluster
• An IAM Instance Profile

In a future release I'd like to have a configuration that allows you to choose Fargate over EC2 as the launch type. But Fargate has no free tier allowance which is why it's been done this way for now.

Services

@saws/container only includes one service: ContainerService

ContainerService

You can require the ContainerService and use it in your saws.js file like so:

const { ContainerService } = require('@saws/container/container-service')

const container = new ContainerService({
  name: 'my-container',
})

module.exports = container

The ContainerService constructor accepts the following options:

name: string

The name of your service. This should be unique across all of your services.

dependencies: ServiceDefinition[]

An array of all of the other services this service depends on. This will ensure that permissions, environment variables, and execution order are all set up.

port?: number

The port to expose on your container. If this port is being used locally already, it will automatically select a different port.

rootDir?: string

Changes the directory that the service looks in for it's code. By default it will be whatever name is.

healthCheckUrl?: string;

The health check URL for ECS to hit to determine the health of your container.

When used as a dependency

When a ContainerService is used as a dependency to other services, it will automatically attach (where applicable) the following environment variables into the dependent services:

• SERVICE_NAME_URL: string - The url to send requests to the container

Libraries

@saws/container does not include any libraries.