How to deploy an opsworks application by cloudformation? - deployment

Question

In a cloudformation template, I create an opsworks stack, a layer, an instance and an application. This template sets up and configures the instance by a chef cookbook of recipes and scripts. How can I deploy the application automatically from the template without clicking manually on deploy inside the stack ? After the deploy the defined Deloy recipes from the cookbook are being executed:
"MyLayer": {
"Type": "AWS::OpsWorks::Layer",
"DependsOn" : "OpsWorksServiceRole",
"Properties": {
"AutoAssignElasticIps" : false,
"AutoAssignPublicIps" : true,
"CustomRecipes" : {
"Setup" : ["cassandra::setup","awscli::setup","settings::setup"],
"Deploy": ["imports::deploy"]
},
"CustomSecurityGroupIds" : { "Ref" : "SecurityGroupIds" },
"EnableAutoHealing" : true,
"InstallUpdatesOnBoot": false,
"LifecycleEventConfiguration": {
"ShutdownEventConfiguration": {
"DelayUntilElbConnectionsDrained": false,
"ExecutionTimeout": 120 }
},
"Name": "script-node",
"Shortname" : "node",
"StackId": { "Ref": "MyStack" },
"Type": "custom",
"UseEbsOptimizedInstances": true,
"VolumeConfigurations": [ {
"Iops": 10000,
"MountPoint": "/dev/sda1",
"NumberOfDisks": 1,
"Size": 20,
"VolumeType": "gp2"
}]
}
}
An application looks like this:
Any idea ?
Thank you.

Answer 1

The CreateDeployment API call generates a one-off event that executes the Deploy actions within your OpsWorks stack. I don't think any official CloudFormation resource maps to this directly, but here are some ideas on how to call it within the context of a CloudFormation template:
Write a Custom Resource that calls CreateDeployment (e.g., via the AWS SDK for Node.js) when created.
Add an AWS::CodePipeline::Pipeline resource to your template that's configured to deploy your OpsWorks app as part of a Deploy Stage. See Using AWS CodePipeline with AWS OpsWorks Stacks for documentation on this integration. (Though it's an extra service + layer of complexity, I think CodePipeline is a better layer of abstraction for modeling deployment actions in your application stack anyway.)

Answer 2

I believe this can be done within the recipes. So in your recipes you'll have a function to validate the app name and if it exists then proceed with the deployment.
For example your deploy recipe would look something like this:
if validator(node[:app][:name]) == true
do whatever
end
and this validator function can reside in your chef library:
def validator(app_name)
app = search("aws_opsworks_app", "name:#{app_name}").first
if app[:deploy] == true
Chef::Log.warn("PROCEEDING: Deploy initiated for #{app[:name]}")
end
end