Install Caprover in AWS Lightsail using Terraform

CaptainRover is an extremely easy to use app/database deployment & web server manager for your NodeJS, Python, PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, WordPress (and etc...) applications, and it's free!

This is a Terraform project to automatically install and configure CaptainRover in an AWS Lightsail server instance. If you want to learn how to use Terraform to configure your AWS Lightsail server check this GitHub Repo.

Setup

Inside our Terraform project, we will use CapRover-cli commands to install and configure CaptainRover in your Server. To install CapRover-cli in your local machine open the Terminal and run:

npm install -g caprover

Run

Now, let's make things work!

Before running the project you must add define some variables in config.json file. Below are the variables you must include and define:

{
    "server_name":"[SERVER_NAME]",
    "server_ip_address":"[SERVER_IP_ADDRESS]",
    "domain":"[YOUR_DOMAIN]",
    "email":"[YOUR_CAPROVER_CONTACT_EMAIL]"
}

Visit your AWS Lightsail dashboard and get the required Server details. For the domain, use same the same that is pointing to your Server and for the email just use the one you prefer.

Once you're configuration is ready, open the Terminal, enter your Terraform's directory, and type the following:

terraform init && 
terraform apply

First command initializes the project and downloads all provider dependencies, the second adds the specified resources.

Small fix - the 'www.' problem

CapRover uses a nginx server as gateway and, consequently, as a router, where each app app_abc is called via a url with the following format [app_abc].[your_cool_domain.com].

A problem arises when you use www. in your url, because www. is treated as part of your app name. To deal with this issue, CapRover allows us to add a custom rewrite rule to nginx. A rule to remove the www. part from the url before parsing and routing to your app. To do so, click the 'Edit Default Nginx Configuration' button in the HTTP Settings of your App (see next image), and add the rule presented below to the beginning of the configuration.

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    <%
    if (s.hasSsl) {
    %>
        listen              443 ssl http2;
        ssl_certificate     <%-s.crtPath%>;
        ssl_certificate_key <%-s.keyPath%>;
    <%
    }
    %>
    server_name $scheme://www.blueresidence.pt;
    return 301 $scheme://blueresidence.pt;
}