Setup of FoundryVTT in AWS using Terraform

This guide assumes some familarity with AWS and limited familiarity with Terraform. I wrote it to get better at Terraform.

Prerequisites

A domain that you control and can update the DNS records to point to AWS Route53
A valid license for Foundry VTT
A free account on terraform.io
An AWS account, with an IAM user with admin acces, access key and secret access key.

Setup

This setup requires two tools - packer to create the AMI with the base foundry install, and terraform to create the infrastructure such as ec2 instances and security groups.

Fork this repo
Make sure you can run packer locally (brew install packer) on your computer and your AWS Access Keys are configured, e.g. aws configure
cd to packer
Download the latest version of foundry vtt to this directory. It should be the linux version and it will be named something like foundryvtt-0.8.8.zip

create a var file www.auto.pkrvars.hcl with the following variable settings

name = "www"
domain = "yourdomain.com"
region = "your preferred region"
foundryvtt = "path-to-your-zip"

If running for the very first time, then run packer with the var file. e.g. packer build --var-file www.auto.pkrvars.hcl foundry.pkr.hcl
If you already have a Foundry Data volume and are just making a new AMI for a new release, then run packer with packer build -only FoundryAMI\* --var-file iwww.auto.pkrvars.hcl foundry.pkr.hcl

You now have a base AMI which has foundry installed on it, but no SSL certificates. You should also have a Foundry Data volume

Create a Terraform workspace and point it to your new fork
In the Variables section of your Terraform workspace, specify the following variables
- home_cidr - required - your IP address to the word, followed by a /32. This will allow you to SSH to your server, and no one else. E.g. 34.56.78.90/32
- domain - required - the domain you bought. Foundry will register itself as https://www.```${domain}```
- public_key - required - the public key you use for ssh. On a mac or linux system it's located in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. On Windows it varies based on what ssh program you use.
- instance_size - optional - The EC2 instance type you want to use. t3a.micro works just fine.
- region - optional - The region to deploy to. Pick one close to you and your players.
Still in the Variables section, under environment variables, create/set the following variables (set to sensitive!) - AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - AWS_DEFAULT_REGION (doesn't have to be set to sensitive)
Here's what your variables screen should look like when done, if you specify all optional values: -
Queue the running of the plan.
Apply the plan.
The plan may not succeed the very first time (if nothing else, it will fail to get the SSL cert), but now you have Route53 set-up.
In the AWS console, go to Route53, go to your hosted zone, and for your domain get the value/route traffic to values for your name servers.
Wherever your registered your domain, update its DNS records to point to the values from the previous step. This may take some 10-30 minutes to propogate to the wider internet. - This will move all domain control away from your registrar and over to Route53 and Terraform.
Terminate your ec2 instance if it's running.
re-run your plan.
Log in to your FoundryVTT instance. You should be able to ssh to ec2-user@www.yourdomain.
Edit the file foundrydata/Config/options.json and add the following "upnp": false, "hostname": "www.<yourdomain>", "dataPath": "/home/ec2-user/foundrydata", "proxySSL": true, "proxyPort": 443,
Restart your foundry by executing sudo systemctl restart foundryvtt
Your foundry should be available at https://www.${domain}.
Once you validate that your foundry is working, you will want to make an AMI of it so you don't have to get new 5-minute URLs all the time.
After you make your AMI, update the variables to point to to the AMI name and owner.

scooper4711/foundryvtt-terraform

Setup of FoundryVTT in AWS using Terraform

Prerequisites

Setup