ECS Deploy

A very simple tool to update tasks Amazon ECS services

npm install -g ecsdeploy

Use as a CLI tool

Let's say we have a task definition file for an ECS service:

{
  "family": "myTestTaskDef",
  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "memoryReservation": "300",
      "essential": true,
      "name": "myContainer",
      "image": "myApp:latest",
      "cpu": "300"
    }
  ]
}

ecsdeploy makes it really easy to deploy.

ecsdeploy -s myService -c myCluster -t myTaskDef.json

{ taskDefinition: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:task-definition/myTestTaskDef:26',
service: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:service/myService',
cluster: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:cluster/myCluster' }

It's also possible to pipe the task definition JSON into ecsdeploy.

cat taskDef.json | ecsdeploy -s myService -c myCluster

{ taskDefinition: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:task-definition/myTestTaskDef:26',
  service: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:service/myService',
  cluster: 'arn:aws:ecs:eu-west-1:12345678909:cluster/myCluster' }

Use Programmatically

const ecsDeploy = require('ecsdeploy')

var opts = {
  taskDefinition: require('./taskDef.json'),
  service: 'myService',
  cluster: 'myCluster'
}

ecsDeploy(opts, (err, result) => {
  console.log(result)
})

Why is ecsdeploy needed?

I found that many of the hosted build servers (CircleCI, TravisCI, etc.) do not have plugins for ECS deployments.

I wanted a simple solution that could be used on any build server Let's say we have a CI/CD pipeline that deploys services to AWS ECS. We generally render the task definition JSON during the build process because every build has different outputs such as image tags, environment variables etc.

By passing the rendered JSON into ecsdeploy, it becomes incredibly simple to kick off deployments in ECS, regardless of the build system you use.