AWS App Runner is a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy containerized applications to AWS. It eliminates the need to manage servers or infrastructure, so you can focus on building and deploying your applications. Read my previous post about AWS App Runner.

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your development workflow. You can use GitHub Actions to build, test, and deploy your applications to App Runner.

In this blog post, we will show you how to use GitHub Actions to build and deploy containerized applications to AWS App Runner. We will cover the following topics:

• The benefits of using GitHub Actions for CI/CD
• The specific steps involved in using GitHub Actions to deploy App Runner apps
• Examples of how GitHub Actions can be used to improve the CI/CD process for App Runner applications

Benefits of using GitHub Actions for CI/CD

GitHub Actions is a powerful and free CI/CD platform that offers a number of benefits, including:

• Flexibility: GitHub Actions is highly flexible, so you can customize your workflows to meet your specific needs.
• Scalability: GitHub Actions is scalable, so you can easily deploy your applications to App Runner at any scale.
• Ease of use: GitHub Actions is easy to use, even for beginners.

Steps involved in using GitHub Actions to deploy App Runner apps

To use GitHub Actions to deploy App Runner apps, you will need to:

1. Create a GitHub Actions workflow. You can do so by going to your repository, selecting the Actions tab, and clicking on New workflow.
2. Assuming you’re building a Docker image, select the Docker Image workflow
3. Set up your workflow yaml
   • You’ll need the following steps in your build job
     • Use checkout@v3 – this will checkout your repo
     • aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1 – configure your credentials
     • aws-actions/amazon-ecr-login@v1 – log in to ECR (assuming you’re using ECR to host your images)
     • docker to build your image and push it

Here’s my sample yaml file:

https://github.com/mindthevirt/sample-yamls/blob/main/github-actions/docker-image.yaml

Examples of how GitHub Actions can be used to improve the CI/CD process for App Runner applications

GitHub Actions can be used to improve the CI/CD process for App Runner applications in a number of ways, including:

• Automating deployments: GitHub Actions can automate the deployment of your applications to App Runner, so you can be sure that your applications are always up-to-date.
• Testing applications: GitHub Actions can be used to test your applications before they are deployed to App Runner. This helps to ensure that your applications are working properly before they are made available to users.
• Rolling back deployments: GitHub Actions can be used to roll back deployments if something goes wrong. This helps to prevent users from seeing broken applications.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I walked through how to set up your GitHub Actions to build and deploy containerized applications to AWS App Runner. We covered the benefits of using GitHub Actions for CI/CD, the specific steps involved in using GitHub Actions to deploy App Runner apps, and examples of how GitHub Actions can be used to improve the CI/CD process for App Runner applications.