🚀How I Achieved My Project: Deploying Docker Images to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)🐳 Part 2

🚀 How I Achieved My Project: Deploying Docker Images to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)🐳

In this post, I’ll walk you through how I successfully pushed my Docker image to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and how Docker made the whole process incredibly seamless. This project involved leveraging Docker's simplicity to move an image from Docker Hub to AWS ECR and then deploying it onto an EC2 instance. Here’s how I did it.

How Docker Streamlined the Project
Docker revolutionizes application deployment by allowing developers to package their applications and all dependencies into containers, ensuring portability and consistency across environments. One of the key benefits of Docker is its ability to create reproducible environments, which makes deploying applications easier and more reliable.

For this project, I used Docker to build my image and initially pushed it to Docker Hub. When it was time to transfer the image to AWS ECR, Docker’s straightforward commands allowed me to easily pull and push the image to ECR, making the process seamless.

Steps to Achieve the Project

1. Docker Installation and Setup

Before starting, I made sure that Docker and AWS CLI were installed on my system. Here are the basic commands to get Docker running on an Ubuntu system:

Install Docker on Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker.io

or

Check my previous post i.e Part 1

Install AWS CLI:

sudo apt install awscli

or

Follow this official document code

Once installed, I configured the AWS CLI using the following command:

aws configure

This allows you to set your AWS access key, secret access key, and default region.

2. Authenticate Docker to AWS ECR

Since my goal was to move the Docker image to AWS ECR, the next step was to authenticate Docker to AWS using the AWS CLI. The get-login-password command simplifies this process by securely logging Docker into ECR.

Authenticate Docker to ECR:

Authenticate Docker to ECR:

aws ecr get-login-password --region us-east-1 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin 9111****75.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

This command retrieves the authentication token from AWS and logs Docker into the specified ECR repository.

3. Docker Image Build and Push to Docker Hub

For this project, I started by pulling my image from Docker Hub. Once the image was pulled, I ran the container using the following command:

Pull the Docker Image:

Pull the Docker Image:

docker pull horlacloud/webapp

This command pulls the Docker image from Docker Hub.

After pulling the image, I proceeded to push the container to AWS ECR so that it could be pulled from there later.

4. Tag the Docker Image for ECR

With Docker authenticated to ECR, I tagged my image to point to the correct repository in AWS ECR. The following command tags the image with the appropriate ECR repository URI:

Tag Docker Image:

docker tag webapp:latest 9111****75.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/webapp:latest

This step prepares the image for pushing to ECR.

5. Push the Image to ECR

After tagging the image, I pushed it to the AWS ECR repository using the command below:

Push Image to ECR:

docker push 9111****75.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/webapp:latest

This command uploads the image to the Amazon ECR repository, making it available for further deployment.

6. Running Docker Image on EC2

To run the image on an EC2 instance, I executed the following commands. This involved pulling the image from ECR and running it on the instance.

Run the Docker Container:

docker run -d -p 8080:80 9111***75.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/webapp:latest
4f04c29bffc5929f40306b0edd282464a9e23bdf5c24f42c1abdb4c84ea84043

After executing the above command, my application was running on port 8080 on the EC2 instance. To access the application, I simply visited:

http://:8080

Useful Docker Commands for the Project

Here are a few helpful Docker commands I used throughout the process:

Making the ubuntu user a root user

If you want to add the ubuntu user to the Docker group (so it can run Docker commands without sudo), use:

sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu

Then, log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

Check Docker Images

To see the list of images on your system, run:

docker image ls

Removing Docker Images

If you need to remove an image, use:

docker rmi

If a container is using the image, stop and remove the container first with:

docker stop 
docker rm

View Running Containers

To list all running containers:

docker ps

Conclusion

Docker has significantly streamlined the process of moving containerized applications between environments. By pushing my Docker image to Docker Hub and pulling it into AWS ECR, I was able to quickly deploy my application on an EC2 instance with minimal configuration. Docker’s portability and ease of use make it an invaluable tool for cloud-native application deployments.

With AWS ECR and Docker, I now have a robust and scalable containerization pipeline ready for future projects. Docker's simplicity makes managing and deploying applications easier and more efficient than ever.