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Inlets on AWS Lightsail

Lightsail is the more simplistic method to setup an Inlets exit node. It requires a keypair which you can create in advance.

Note: Lightsail doesn't let us use unique high ports apparently, or at least I can't figure out how to add an AWS security group as of now, so we'll use port 80 here, rather than the standard 8090 that Inlets uses. The only drawback of this is if you intend to also run a webserver on your Lightsail instance, in which case both Inlets and your webserver would be attempting to use port 80, and the one that started up last would probably fail.

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 Lightsail for you quickly.

Prerequisites

  • Terraform
  • An AWS account
  • An AWS Keypair

To create your own AWS keypair, execute the command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -N '' -f lightsail_keypair

You will then import the keypair with Terraform.

Prepare to run terraform

These steps include:

  • Install terraform

  • Clone this repository

  • Run 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_pair_name in 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.2019-08-24.12.33.12.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.2019-08-24.12.33.12.out

aws_lightsail_key_pair.lightsail_keypair: Creating...
aws_lightsail_instance.inlets: Creating...
aws_lightsail_key_pair.lightsail_keypair: Creation complete after 6s [id=lightsail_keypair]
aws_lightsail_instance.inlets: Still creating... [10s elapsed]
aws_lightsail_instance.inlets: Still creating... [20s elapsed]
aws_lightsail_instance.inlets: Creation complete after 28s [id=inlets]

Apply complete! Resources: 2 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

The state of your infrastructure has been saved to the path
below. This state is required to modify and destroy your
infrastructure, so keep it safe. To inspect the complete state
use the `terraform show` command.

State path: terraform.tfstate

Outputs:

inlets_token = 377e8e489e9ef023459e37e88bc4163ffe9fc241d4d9dee7b812287d46990f6z
public_ip_address = 13.58.186.168

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="377e8e489e9ef023459e37e88bc4163ffe9fc241d4d9dee7b812287d46990f6z"

export REMOTE="13.58.186.168:80"

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

In a web browser, now you can open the url 13.58.186.168:80 and see your application that was just now only running locally.

Hope you enjoy!