CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Nitric

What we'll be doing

In this guide we will demonstrate how Nitric can be used for continuous deployments to AWS in a GitHub action CI/CD pipeline. The action we write can be simply modified for GCP or Azure deployments.

Setting up CI/CD with Nitric and GitHub actions

GitHub has comprehensive documentation which can guide you through advanced workflows.

Here we'll walk through the simple example of deploying a Nitric project to AWS.

Lets start by getting our workflow setup

In your project you'll want to create a yaml file which contains your workflow config. You can name this file anything you like, in this example we've gone with 'deploy-aws.yaml'.

It should be placed the folder .github/workflows

Full example

name: Sample configuration to deploy to AWS
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
env:
  PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
  PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
jobs:
  update:
    name: Update
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Nitric CLI
        uses: nitrictech/setup-nitric@v1
        with:
          version: 1.2.1
      - name: Install dependencies
        uses: pulumi/setup-pulumi@v2
      - name: Checkout project
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Resolve packages
        run: npm install
      - name: Deploy stack to aws
        run: nitric up -s dev -v0

Breaking it down

Edit the config file and start by defining a name.

name: Sample configuration to deploy to AWS

Setup action triggers

Action triggers tell your workflow when to run.

• workflow_dispatch
  • This trigger allows the workflow to be manually run from GitHub
• push -> branches -> main
  • This will trigger this workflow each time a push is performed on the main branch

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

Configuring environment variables

Configure the environment variables required by Nitric's dependency Pulumi as GitHub secrets. Which can be found by navigating to https://github.com/{user}/{project}/settings/secrets/actions.

• PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN

  • You can get a pulumi access token by logging into pulumi on the browser and going to your profile settings. Under the 'Access Tokens' tab click 'Create token'.

• PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE

  • For interaction free experiences, Pulumi also requires a passphrase to be configured. Your passphrase is used to generate a unique key which encrypts configuration and state values. E.g. 'my-secret-password'

env:
  PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE }}
  PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

Intialize your workflow

Assign a name and set what os it will be run on.

Note: Nitric currently only supports ubuntu-latest.

jobs:
  update:
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

AWS Credentials

Setup your AWS action with the following credentials as GitHub secrets:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_REGION

You'll obtain both of these keys from the amazon console, an example region would be us-east-2.

steps:
  - name: Configure AWS Credentials
    uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1
    with:
      aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
      aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
      aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

Install Nitric and dependencies

This makes it possible for you to run nitric commands e.g. nitric up -s dev.

- name: Install Nitric CLI
  uses: nitrictech/setup-nitric@v1
  with:
    version: 1.2.1
- name: Install dependencies
  uses: pulumi/setup-pulumi@v2

Deploying the stack

Finally, checkout your project and run the up command to deploy your project. In this project we've initialized a stack which deploys to AWS named dev with the command nitric up -s dev -v0

- name: Checkout project
  uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Resolve packages
  run: npm install
- name: Deploy stack to aws
  run: nitric up -s dev -v0