ec2

Inlets on AWS EC2

This is a demonstration using Terraform to create an Inlets exit node on an AWS EC2 instance.

What is Inlets?

Inlets is a fairly new project that allows you to setup reverse proxy, websocket tunnels, or other endpoints to the public internet, it is similar to ngrok. The video overview from Alex Ellis shows how simple it makes setting up the environment.

In the Inlets repository there are 'hacks' to setup Inlets nodes using DigitalOcean and other cloud platforms. This is intended to provision an Inlets node on AWS EC2 for you quickly. I suppose this can also be called a hack.

How?

Note: We don't create an AWS keypair in Terraform, I consider that bad form. In order to avoid any security concerns we expect that you use a keypair previously generated or uploaded to your AWS account.

Prerequisites

• Terraform
• An AWS account
• An AWS Keypair

Prepare to run terraform

These steps include:

• Installing terraform

• Cloning this repository

• Running terraform init in the cloned directory

• Exporting environment variable for your AWS_PROFILE and AWS_REGION. This looks something like:

  export AWS_PROFILE=blah && export AWS_REGION=us-east-2

Note: You will need to change the key_name on line 64 of main.tf to the name of your own keypair.

Create the terraform plan

Run the command:

token=$(head -c 16 /dev/urandom | sha256sum | cut -d" " -f1); terraform plan -out=terraform_plan.$(date +%F.%H.%M.%S).out  -var "token=$token"

This will output a file with a name such as: terraform_plan.2019-08-20.23.04.54.out

Note: You might not have sha256sum on your system, it can be replaced with shasum.

Apply the terraform plan

Apply the plan that you created in the previous step after reviewing the plan output.

terraform apply terraform_plan.2019-08-20.23.04.54.out
...
Apply complete! Resources: 25 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

inlets_token = 2395590c8b333cb2cb9f54ac152aac03e0365c1c69ce20348a3124b84c98ec62
public_ip_address = 3.19.218.92

The terraform output provides the Inlets token required by the client to authenticate with the server, and the public IP address of the EC2 instance. Use this info in the below steps.

Remove your Inlets node

When you want to remove this infrastructure, run terraform destroy.

Connecting to Inlets

This is documented in the Inlets README, but basically on your client (laptop?) you need an application such as a webserver running:

cd blog
make serve 
JEKYLL_ENV=development jekyll serve
Configuration file: _config.yml
            Source: .
       Destination: _site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating... 
                    done in 1.149 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled for 'myblog'
    Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Then in another terminal session start the client:

export TOKEN="2395590c8b333cb2cb9f54ac152aac03e0365c1c69ce20348a3124b84c98ec62"

export REMOTE="3.19.218.92:8090"

inlets client  --remote=$REMOTE --upstream=http://127.0.0.1:4000 --token $TOKEN

In a web browser, now you can open the url 3.19.218.92:8090 and see your application that was just now only running locally.

Hope you enjoy!