registering ECS tasks with codeship - amazon-ecs

Question

I am trying to deploy an application to AWS ECS using codeship. I have my docker-compose file and everything is ready to be deployed. Codeship documentation says to do something like this in the codeship-steps.yml file:
aws ecs register-task-definition --cli-input-json file:///deploy/tasks/backend.json
aws ecs update-service --service my-backend-service --task-definition backend
My question is, is this file file:///deploy/tasks/backend.json something I have to provide manually or is it created automatically as well as the ECS task. because I keep getting this error from codeship
An error occurred (ClientException) when calling the RunTask operation: TaskDefinition not found.

Answer 1

file:///deploy/tasks/backend.json is something you provide to aws ecs register-task-definition.
Looked it up here, this will generate the structure of that file you want:
aws ecs register-task-definition --generate-cli-skeleton
You can then modify it, after throwing it in backend.json, for instance (provided you redirect the output of the command into a file called backend.json).
If you look at the suggested service definition:
awsdeployment:
image: codeship/aws-deployment
encrypted_env_file: aws-deployment.env.encrypted
environment:
- AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1
volumes:
- ./:/deploy
You can see that ./ is mapped to the /deploy mount point. This means that if in your repo, you create a directory called tasks, then you place your json file there, and you should be all set.