Tag: bref

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Including the git tag as an environment var in AWS Lambda (via Bitbucket Pipeline Deployments & serverless)

When deploying with the Serverless framework (which Bitbucket Pipelines can do), I wanted to include a version number (or other vars & options passed in the Serverless CLI) which triggered the deploy (via Bitbucket Pipelines).

In my case, this is shown in the footer of a Symfony web-app (more on that below).

Here’s how this can be achieved;

Serverless

In serverless.yml, we need to define our env-var within the function (or as i’ve done, for all functions, by placing it in the ‘provider’ -> ‘environment’ variables);

DEPLOY_VERSION: ${opt:deploy-version, 'unknown'}

In the above example, my ENV file will be called ‘DEPLOY_VERSION’

The ‘${opt:…} basically gets an option we’ve specified in the serverless deploy command-line (eg. serverless deploy –deploy-version v1.2.3 )

This allows us to pass environment vars from the command line, to our functions (in our case, we’re saying version 1.2.3 of our software is getting deployed).

Then, in Bitbucket;

Next, in our bitbucket-pipelines.yml file, we need to include some extra vars in the ‘atlassian/serverless-deploy:…’ pipe – eg;

EXTRA_ARGS: '... --deploy-version $BITBUCKET_TAG'

Here, we just specify our own option called ‘deploy-version’ (eg. ‘–deploy-version’), and used a variable which bitbucket includes at deploy-time (in our case, it’s called BITBUCKET_TAG).

In my case, i’m using tags to deploy new version of an app (eg. v1.2.3)

Using it with Symfony

From there, it’s upto you how your AWS Lambda function actually uses the environment variable. In my case, i’m using Symfony (with Bref to run it on Lambda). This requires an additional couple of steps;

In the .env file, I need to specify my default value for the env file (eg. when i’m developing it locally, etc);

DEPLOY_VERSION=dev-master

From there, in my case I then include it as a global variable in my templates, by adding it to my ‘config/packages/twig.yaml‘ file;

parameters:
    deploy_version: '%env(DEPLOY_VERSION)%'

twig:
    globals:
        deploy_version: '%deploy_version%'

And then in the footer of my pages, I can include it (eg. base.twig.html);

<p><small>Version: {{ deploy_version }}</small></p>

Done!

In summary, now when we deploy via Bitbucket Pipelines, we’ll have the version number used in the tag, included in our Symfony app (or whatever Lambda function you have).

Of course this could be used for any variable available in Bitbucket Pipelines (or event via the command-line in the Serverless framework)

Enjoy!

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Using Symfony on Lambda

For those going down the server-less route and using Symfony, this will hopefully give you a decent starting point.

I’ve added a ‘part 2‘ to this post, with performance optimisations, as well as handling being behind the API Gateway.

This uses a project called Bref – their website is a great starting point and has loads of info.

Ingredients (what you’ll need on-hand);

Method (how do we do this);

A lot of these instructions come from https://bref.sh

For this example, we’ll use ap-southeast-2 as the region (as all my scripts are written using it)

IMPORTANT: If you decide to use a different region (eg. one closer to home/your users), make sure you use the same region for S3 as well as the runtime (mentioned later). Otherwise you’ll run into permission issues you’ll never be able to solve!

2) Jump into the project dir (eg. my-project), and install bref using composer;

1) Install the Symfony skeleton project (see https://symfony.com/doc/current/setup.html) & check to make sure it works as expected.

composer require mnapoli/bref

You may also need to run the following;

vendor/bin/bref init

3) Create an AWS S3 bucket to store your ‘packaged’ files;

aws s3 mb s3://symfony-lambda --region=ap-southeast-2

4) Create a deploy.sh executable file to save yourself some typing;

#!/bin/bash

# Package up your files and send it to an S3 bucket you're going to use;
sam package --output-template-file .stack-symfony.yaml     --s3-bucket symfony-lambda --region=ap-southeast-2

# Deploy (using cloud-formation, which will create your lambda function, etc)
sam deploy --template-file .stack-symfony.yaml --stack-name symfony-lambda --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM --region=ap-southeast-2

5) Create a cloudformation template file (we’ll call this ‘.stack-symfony.yaml’ … if you want to call it something different, put in the new name in the above command instead);

 AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
 Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
 

 Description: ''
 Outputs:
   DemoHttpApi:
     Description: URL of our function in the *Prod* environment
     Value: !Sub 'https://${ServerlessRestApi}.execute-api.${AWS::Region}.amazonaws.com/Prod/'
 

 Globals:
     Function:
         Environment:
             Variables:
                 APP_ENV: prod
 Resources:
   Website:
     Properties:
       CodeUri: s3://<your s3 bucket here>/94ce2f32ac156cd3f06208d3e05dca8f
       Description: ''
       Events:
         HttpRoot:
           Properties:
             Method: ANY
             Path: /
           Type: Api
         HttpSubPaths:
           Properties:
             Method: ANY
             Path: /{proxy+}
           Type: Api
       FunctionName: symfony-website
       Handler: public/index.php
       MemorySize: 1024
       Layers:
         - arn:aws:lambda:ap-southeast-2:416566615250:layer:php-72-fpm:8
       Runtime: provided
       Timeout: 30
     Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
   MyFunctionCli:
     Properties:
       CodeUri: s3://<your s3 bucket here>/94ce2f32ac156cd3f06208d3e05dca8f
       FunctionName: symfony-console
       Handler: bin/console
       Timeout: 120  # in seconds
       Layers:
         - arn:aws:lambda:ap-southeast-2:416566615250:layer:php-72-fpm:8
         - arn:aws:lambda:ap-southeast-2:416566615250:layer:console:4
       Runtime: provided
     Type: AWS::Serverless::Function

Runtimes (basically the PHP executable which is needed by Lambda (PHP isn’t built into lambda, so we supply it as a ‘layer’). See; https://bref.sh/docs/runtimes/

In the file above, add in your s3 bucket name, and replace the ‘layers’ mentioned above with the later from your region (if you’ve decided to use a different one). See; https://bref.sh/docs/runtimes/

6) Run your ./deploy.sh script and follow the prompts if there’s any issues.

I ran into multiple permission issues which were all easily solved by giving access to the user i’d created for this project.

See the Symfony bref guide for more details if you get stuck; https://bref.sh/docs/frameworks/symfony.html

Cost;

This article is of course free, but there’s some on-going costs you’ll need to consider with Lambda. The few websites i’ve read regarding this seem to indicate it’s cheaper than running an EC2 instance (both from an actual cost and a time-cost in maintaining the thing), but of course you can do a lot of things with EC2!

The cost estimates i’m using come from US East (Ohio), and were taken on 8/Feb/2019;

  • Lambda (for your actual PHP server-side code)
    • $3.50/million requests – first 333 million requests/month
    • AWS Lambda – Compute Free Tier – 400,000 GB-Seconds – US East (Ohio)12.163 Lambda-GB-Second
    • AWS Lambda – Requests Free Tier – 1,000,000 Requests – US East (Ohio)
  • S3 (for storage of your packaged site, as well as any assets – css/images/js/uploaded files);
    • $0.005 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
    • $0.004 per 10,000 GET and all other requests
    • $0.023 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
  • Some others include;
    • Bandwidth
    • CloudFront (for serving up your assets if you use it later on)
    • Relational Database Service (for a database if you need one)
    • Route 53 (for your DNS needs)
    • Simple Email Service (for sending emails)

Inspiration from this comes from this YouTube vid – well worth watching;