☁️ cloud-1 ☁️

This project automates the deployment of a full-stack infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using Terraform and Docker. It specifically provisions a Virtual Machine (VM) and automatically deploys the Inception project (a LEMP stack in Docker) upon startup.

🛠️ Workflow Overview

1. 🚀 Terraform provisions a GCP Compute Engine instance.
2. 🔑 Metadata is used to securely pass the .env configuration to the instance.
3. ⚙️ Startup Script (startup-instance.sh) runs automatically on the VM to:
   • Install Docker and Docker Compose.
   • Clone the Inception repository.
   • Retrieve the .env from metadata and place it in the correct location.
   • Build and launch the Docker containers using make.

🔑 Key Components

• main.tf: Terraform configuration defining the VM instances, networking, and firewall rules. Supports scaling via node_count.
• launch-vm.sh: A wrapper script that initializes Terraform, applies the configuration, and monitors the startup of all instances in parallel.
• startup-instance.sh: The script that runs inside each VM to bootstrap the environment and deploy the application.
• setup_ubuntu.sh: A local helper script to install Terraform and the Google Cloud CLI on your Ubuntu machine.

📋 Prerequisites

• 🛠️ Virtualized Environment (Optional): Vagrant and VirtualBox if using the automated setup.
• 🧩 Terraform (if running locally).
• 🔧 Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) (if running locally).
• 🌐 A GCP project with a service account key (cloud-1-key.json).

🚀 Setup Options

Choose the setup that best fits your environment:

Option A: Local Setup (Ubuntu)

If you are on an Ubuntu machine and have permissions to install dependencies locally:

1. Run the setup script:

   ./setup_ubuntu.sh

2. Authenticate with GCP:

   gcloud init

Option B: Virtualized Environment (Vagrant) – Recommended for Submissions

If you cannot install dependencies on your host machine or want a clean, isolated environment for evaluation:

1. Spin up the pre-configured Ubuntu VM:

   vagrant up

2. SSH into the VM:

   vagrant ssh

3. Inside the VM, initialize GCP:

   gcloud init

   All necessary tools (Terraform, gcloud CLI) are pre-installed via the Vagrant provisioning script.

▶️ Usage

Regardless of your setup (Local or Vagrant), follow these steps to deploy:

1. Configuration

• GCP Key: Place your Google Cloud service account key as cloud-1-key.json in the project root.
• Environment Variables: Create a .env file in the root with your Inception project secrets. This file is automatically passed to the VM via metadata.

2. Launch

Run the automated deployment script:

./launch-vm.sh

🌐 Accessing the Application

Once the deployment is complete, the launch-vm.sh script will provide the list of external IPs for all created nodes. You can also find them via:

terraform output instance_ips

• Wordpress: http://<IP_NODE_X>
• phpMyAdmin: http://<IP_NODE_X>:8080

🏗️ Parallel Deployment & Scaling

This project supports deploying multiple independent servers simultaneously.

To change the number of servers:

1. Open main.tf.
2. Update the node_count variable:

   variable "node_count" {
     type    = number
     default = 3 # Change this as needed
   }

3. Run ./launch-vm.sh again. Terraform will provision the additional instances in parallel.

🔍 Troubleshooting

If an application instance is not accessible, you can check its startup script logs by SSHing into the specific VM:

# The launch script provides these commands at the end
gcloud compute ssh cloud-1 --zone=europe-west1-b --command="tail -f /var/log/startup-script.log"
gcloud compute ssh cloud-2 --zone=europe-west1-b --command="tail -f /var/log/startup-script.log"

Note

The default zone is europe-west1-b. You can modify this and other variables in main.tf.