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  • September 5, 2021

How to create a DigitalOcean droplet for hosting Spring Boot app using Terraform

1. Overview

In this article, we’re going to be creating a new DigitalOcean droplet to host a Java (Spring Boot) web application using Hashicorp Terraform.

2. Terraform Basics

Terraform simplifies the process of setting up a new server with the help of configuration files. Terraform configuration files are plain text files with a .tf extension. The contents of a Terraform configuration file is composed of Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL).

The language consists of blocks, expressions and arguments, and they instruct Terraform on how to manage cloud resources like server instances, networking, DNS etc.

Cloud providers form the core of Terraform. Different cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean implement APIs exposed by Terraform.

In this article, we’re going to focus on using DigitalOcean as our cloud provider, hence it’s recommended to create a DigitalOcean account. It’s required that we download Terraform and add the executable binary to our CLI path, if not done already.

Let’s create a directory that will contain all our Terraform configuration files and initialise it as a Git repo:

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mkdir terraform-demo
git init

3. Provider Setup

Let’s create a provider.tf file in the terraform-demo directory with the following content:

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terraform {                                 
  required_version = "~> 1.0.0"             
  required_providers {                      
    digitalocean = {                        
      source = "digitalocean/digitalocean"  
      version = "~> 2.0"                    
    }                                       
  }                                         
}

In the snippet above, the first required_version defines the Terraform version our configuration files will conform to. Furthermore, we also declare a dependency on digitalocean provider version 2.0.

Now that we have a provider definition, let’s initialise our working directory as a Terraform project by executing the following command from the terraform-demo directory:

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terraform init

If this is successful, we should see this line in the console, among other lines:

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Terraform has been successfully initialized!

In order for Terraform to be able to communicate with our provider - DigitalOcean, we need to configure a valid access token. We can generate a new API token by going to API » Token/Keys on the DigitalOcean dashboard.

When we click on the Generate New Token button, it will show us a modal where we can provide a name for our token and set its permissions:

Digital ocean api keys page

Let’s update the provider.tf configuration file with the new token:

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provider "digitalocean" {   
  token = "your-token-here" 
}

The API token is sensitive information that should not be in the public domain. Fortunately, Terraform allows variables in configuration files. Therefore, we will create a terraform.tfvars file in the terraform-demo directory with the following content:

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do_token = "your_generated_digital_ocean_token"

Let’s update the provider.tf accordingly:

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variable "do_token" {}    
                          
provider "digitalocean" { 
  token = var.do_token    
}

By default, Terraform will try to read the do_token variable from any .tfvars file present in the root directory. If there’s none, it will prompt us to provide a value for it on the CLI when processing the configuration file.

The best part with this approach is that we can add terraform.tfvars to .gitignore to exclude it from Git.

We need to configure the SSH key that Terraform will use to access the server instance we will create in later parts of this article. Let’s start by generating a password-less SSH keypair:

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ssh-keygen

When prompted to Enter file in which to save the key we will supply ./demo and when prompted for a passphrase, we will press the Return/Enter key which means we want to use an empty passphrase.

In the end, we will have two new files demo and demo.pub in our current directory. We need to copy the content of demo.pub and paste it in Setting » Security » Add SSH Key on the DigitalOcean web portal:

Digital ocean add ssh key page

Let’s add the following content to our provider.tf file:

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data "digitalocean_ssh_key" "terraform" { 
  name = "demo"                           
}

Up until now, we’ve defined blocks that start with terraform, provider and variable. The data block is a special one that instructs Terraform to read information from an external source. In this case, we’re asking Terraform to read a digitalocean_ssh_key with the name “demo” from DigitalOcean.

The complete provider.tf file, up until this point, should look like this:

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terraform {                                 
  required_version = "~> 1.0.0"             
  required_providers {                      
    digitalocean = {                        
      source = "digitalocean/digitalocean"  
      version = "~> 2.0"                    
    }                                       
  }                                         
}                                           
                                            
variable "do_token" {}                      
                                            
provider "digitalocean" {                   
  token = var.do_token                      
}                                           
                                            
data "digitalocean_ssh_key" "terraform" {   
  name = "demo"                             
}

4. Resource Setup

The resource block of a Terraform configuration file describes one or more infrastructure objects like server instances, virtual networks and DNS records.

What we want to do in this section is to create a new DigitalOcean droplet type resource that we can configure to host our demo Spring Boot application.

Let’s create a new file called server.tf, in the terraform-demo directory, with the following content:

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resource "digitalocean_droplet" "demo-server" {  
  image = "ubuntu-20-04-x64"                     
  name = "demo-server"                           
  region = "fra1"                                
  size = "s-1vcpu-1gb"                           
  monitoring = true                              
  ssh_keys = [                                   
    data.digitalocean_ssh_key.terraform.id       
  ]                                              
}

In the snippet above, we declared that Terraform should create a new DigitalOcean droplet with the name demo-server. The droplet will have 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM and be created in the fra1 region.

Also, we enabled monitoring for the droplet and set the SSH key to be the one we configured earlier.

At this stage, we can plan and apply the Terraform configuration we’ve been building up till now. Let’s run the Terraform plan command, so we can have an overview of what Terraform will do:

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terraform plan

This will produce a similar output to the following:

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Terraform will perform the following actions:

  # digitalocean_droplet.demo-server will be created
  + resource "digitalocean_droplet" "demo-server" {
      + backups              = false
      + created_at           = (known after apply)
      + disk                 = (known after apply)
      + id                   = (known after apply)
      + image                = "ubuntu-20-04-x64"
      + ipv4_address         = (known after apply)
      + ipv4_address_private = (known after apply)
      + ipv6                 = false
      + ipv6_address         = (known after apply)
      + locked               = (known after apply)
      + memory               = (known after apply)
      + monitoring           = true
      + name                 = "demo-server"
      + price_hourly         = (known after apply)
      + price_monthly        = (known after apply)
      + private_networking   = (known after apply)
      + region               = "fra1"
      + resize_disk          = true
      + size                 = "s-1vcpu-1gb"
      + ssh_keys             = [
          + "31199473",
        ]
      + status               = (known after apply)
      + urn                  = (known after apply)
      + vcpus                = (known after apply)
      + volume_ids           = (known after apply)
      + vpc_uuid             = (known after apply)
    }

Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

From the output, we can infer that Terraform will add 1 DigitalOcean droplet instance in the fra1 region with the SSH key that we supplied and the size we specified.

That’s good enough for us to apply our configuration:

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terraform apply

This will prompt us to input ‘yes’ to proceed and on success, we should see a similar output to this:

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Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Let’s add a connection block to the existing resource block in the server.tf:

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connection {                       
  host = self.ipv4_address         
  user = "root"                    
  type = "ssh"                     
  private_key = file(var.pvt_key)  
  timeout = "2m"                   
}

Terraform will use the information we provide in this connection block to SSH into the server and execute some scripts automatically, during setup. This expression file(var.pvt_key) uses the file function to load the private key. However, instead of supplying the actual path, we’re using a variable pvt_key and we need to declare it in provider.tf:

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variable "pvt_key" {}

Let’s also add the actual value to terraform.tfvars just as we did for the DigitalOcean token:

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pvt_key = "full/path/to/demo"

Next, we’ll use Terraform’s remote-exec provisioner to invoke scripts that will install Nginx and Java JRE. Let’s add the following content to the server.tf file:

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provisioner "remote-exec" {               
  inline = [                              
    "echo Installing Nginx",              
    "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin",         
    "sudo apt update",                    
    "sudo apt install -y nginx",          
    "reboot"                              
  ]                                       
}                                         
                                          
provisioner "remote-exec" {               
  inline = [                              
    "echo Installing Java JRE",           
    "apt-get update",                     
    "apt-get install -y openjdk-11-jre",  
    "java -version"                       
  ]                                       
}

Each block of remote-exec provisioner executes a series of commands that we would have to execute manually if we’re not using Terraform.

There are other configurations tasks that go into making a server instance production ready, like creating a dedicated system user, setting up a systemd service and firewall. We’ll automate these operations by adding appropriate scripts to the server configuration file.

The complete server.tf file looks like this (with added comments to make it more readable):

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resource "digitalocean_droplet" "demo-server" {                                                      
  image = "ubuntu-20-04-x64"                                                                         
  name = "demo-server"                                                                               
  region = "fra1"                                                                                    
  size = "s-1vcpu-1gb"                                                                               
  monitoring = true                                                                                  
  ssh_keys = [                                                                                       
    data.digitalocean_ssh_key.terraform.id                                                           
  ]                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #terraform will use this to SSH into the server                                                    
  #for script execution	                                                                             
  connection {                                                                                       
    host = self.ipv4_address                                                                         
    user = "root"                                                                                    
    type = "ssh"                                                                                     
    private_key = file(var.pvt_key)                                                                  
    timeout = "2m"                                                                                   
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #install Nginx                                                                                     
  provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                        
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo Installing Nginx",                                                                       
      "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin",                                                                  
      "sudo apt update",                                                                             
      "sudo apt install -y nginx",                                                                   
      "reboot"                                                                                       
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #install Java JRE                                                                                  
  provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                        
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo Installing Java JRE",                                                                    
      "apt-get update",                                                                              
      "apt-get install -y openjdk-11-jre",                                                           
      "java -version"                                                                                
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
 #create system user javajar                                                                         
 #and dedicated directories and configure ownership                                                  
 provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                         
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo Creating app user and directory",                                                        
      "mkdir -p /opt/java/webapps",                                                                  
      "mkdir -p /opt/java/webapps/conf",                                                             
      "useradd -s /bin/false -r -U javajar",                                                         
      "chown -R javajar:javajar /opt/java/webapps/",                                                 
      "mkdir -p /var/log/java-webapps",                                                              
      "chown -R javajar:javajar /var/log/java-webapps/"                                              
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #copy nginx config from our local machine                                                          
  #to replace the one on the server                                                                  
  #the local config contains reverse-proxy                                                           
  provisioner "file" {                                                                               
    source = "nginx-default-site.conf"                                                               
    destination = "/etc/nginx/sites-available/nginx-default-site.conf"                               
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #copy the systemd file to run our spring boot app                                                  
  #from local machine to the server                                                                  
  provisioner "file" {                                                                               
	source = "java-systemd-service.conf"                                                             
    destination = "/etc/systemd/system/gitlab-ci-demo.service"                                       
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #copy our sample jar file                                                                          
  provisioner "file" {                                                                               
    source      = "gitlab-ci-demo.jar"                                                               
    destination = "/opt/java/webapps/gitlab-ci-demo.jar"                                             
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
                                                                                                     
  #make the nginx config we copied to be the default                                                 
  provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                        
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo Configuring Nginx Sites-available file",                                                 
      "mv /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default-old",                
      "mv /etc/nginx/sites-available/nginx-default-site.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default",    
      "systemctl restart nginx"                                                                      
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #start the java service                                                                            
  provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                        
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo Configuring Java systemd service",                                                       
      "systemctl enable gitlab-ci-demo.service",                                                     
      "systemctl daemon-reload",                                                                     
      "systemctl start gitlab-ci-demo.service"                                                       
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
  #configure ububtu firewall and                                                                     
  #reset the root user password                                                                      
  provisioner "remote-exec" {                                                                        
    inline = [                                                                                       
      "echo 'root:changemepassword' | chpasswd",                                                     
      "sudo ufw allow \"Nginx Full\"",                                                               
      "sudo ufw allow OpenSSH",                                                                      
      "echo 'y' | ufw enable"                                                                        
    ]                                                                                                
  }                                                                                                  
                                                                                                     
}

Apart from remote-exec, we also use a file provisioner to copy some files from our local machine to the server.

The next thing is for us to apply our changes but first, we need to destroy the older version and then apply the new update, typing ‘yes’ every time we’re prompted:

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terraform destroy

terraform apply

After applying the final update successfully, we can get the ipv4_address of the instance by running:

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terraform show

With the ipv4 address, we can SSH into the server and/or open it in our web browser to see our demo application running. It should print “Hello World” and the current timestamp.

Since this is a demo setup, we should clean up the resources to avoid unnecessary costs:

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terraform destroy

5. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve seen how to use Terraform to manage different cloud infrastructures. We provisioned a new server instance, copy files to it, execute shell scripts and install the required software. This article is an eye-opener, and we can do much more with Terraform.

We can make our Terraform configuration more modular and portable by using variables where applicable.

For further reading, please consult the complete DigitalOcean provider documentation here and the complete source code is available on Github.

Happy Coding

Seun Matt

Has over 7 years of experience in Software Engineering and management with a solid understanding of Java technologies, programming principles and project management.

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