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AWS Foundry VTT CloudFormation Deployment with TLS Encryption

This is a fork of the Foundry CF deploy script by Lupert and Cat.

New Things

  • Supports Foundry 11/12+
  • Amazon Linux 2023 on Graviton EC2s
  • Node 20.x
  • IPv6 support

Note this is just something being done in my spare time and for fun/interest. If you have any contributions, they're welcome. Please note that I'm only focusing on AWS as the supported hosting service.

Installation

You'll need some technical expertise and basic familiarity with AWS to get this running. It's not quite click-ops, but it's close. Some parts do require some click-ops once.

You can also refer to the original repo's wiki, but the gist is:

Foundry VTT Download

Download the NodeJS installer for Foundry VTT from the Foundry VTT website. Then either:

  • Upload it to Google Drive, make the link publicly shared (anyone with the link can view), or
  • Upload it somewhere else it can be fetched publicly, or
  • Have a Foundry VTT Patreon download link handy, or
  • Generate a time-limited link from the Foundry VTT site; This option isn't really recommended, but if that works for you then that's cool

Once your server is up and running, if you used eg. a Google Drive link or your own hosted site, you can remove the installer as it's not used past the initial deployment.

AWS Pre-setup

This only needs to be done once, no matter how many times you redeploy.

  • Create an SSH key in EC2, under EC2 / Key Pairs
    • Keep the downloaded private keypair (PEM or PPK) file safe, you'll need it for SSH / SCP access to the EC2 server instance
    • If you tear down and redeploy the CloudFormation stack you can reuse the same SSH key
    • Consider rotating these keys regularly as a good security practise

AWS Setup

Note: This script currently only supports your default VPC, which should have been created automatically when you first signed up for your AWS acccount.

If you want to use IPv6, see the IPv6 docs for how to configure your default VPC.

  • Go to CloudFormation and choose to Create a Stack with new resources
    • Leave Template is Ready selected
    • Choose Upload a template file
    • Upload the /cloudformation/Foundry_Deployment.yaml file from this project
    • Fill in and check all the details. I've tried to provide sensible defaults. At a minimum if you leave the defaults, the ones that need to be filled in are:
      • The link for downloading Foundry
      • An admin user password (for IAM)
      • Your domain name and TLD eg. mydomain.com
        • Important: Do not include www or any other sub-domain prefix
      • Your email address for LetsEncrypt TLS (https) certificate issuance
      • The SSH keypair you previously set up in EC2 / Key Pairs
      • Choose whether the S3 bucket already exists, or if it should be created
      • The S3 bucket name for storing files
        • This name must be globally unique across all S3 buckets that exist on AWS
        • If you host Foundry on eg. foundry.mydomain.com then foundry-mydomain-com is a good recommendation

It should be automated from there. If all goes well, the server will take around five minutes or so to become accessible.

Optional SSH Access

If you want to allow yourself access via SSH, you must specify a valid subnet range for your IPv4 / IPv6 address.

  • For IPv4 access, use [your IPv4 address]/32 unless you know what you're doing
  • For IPv6 access, use [your IPv6 address]/128 unless you know what you're doing
    • As IPv6 device addresses change quite frequently, it's likely this will need to be updated often until you know what a more permissive subnet range looks like for you; A more permissive IPv6 range might be 0123:4567:89ab::/64 for example

You can always manually add or update SSH access later in EC2 / Security Groups in the AWS Console.

Running the Server on a Schedule

If you don't have a need for your Foundry server to run 24/7, AWS Systems Manager lets you configure a simple schedule to start and stop your EC2 Foundry instance and save on hosting costs.

  1. From the AWS Console, navigate to Systems Manager

  2. Then,

    • if this is your first time using System Manager, choose Quick Setup, or
    • if you already have other services configured in Systems Manager, choose Quick Setup and then click the Create button

  3. Choose Resource Scheduler

    • Enter a tag name of Name with a value of [the Foundry CloudFormation stack name]-Server
      • You can find the server name in EC2 / Instances if you're unsure
    • Choose which days and what times on those days you want the server to be active
    • Choose Current Account and Current Region as targets unless your needs differ

  4. Create the schedule

Once it's successfully provisioned, the next time it ticks over a trigger time the Foundry EC2 server will be started or stopped as appropriate, saving you from paying for time that you aren't using the server.

If you do need to access the server outside of the schedule, you can always start and stop it manually from the EC2 list without affecting the Resource Scheduler.

If your needs are more complex, you could instead consider setting up the AWS Instance Scheduler stack. There's a nominal cost per month to run the services required.

Security and Updates

Linux auto-patching is enabled by default. A utility script utils/kernel_updates.sh also exists to help you manage this if you want to disable, re-enable, or run it manually.

It's also recommended to SSH into the instance and run sudo dnf upgrade every so often to make sure your packages are up to date with the latest fixes and security releases.

Upgrading From a Previous Installation

see Upgrading

Debugging Failed CloudFormation

As long as you can get as far as the EC2 being spun up, then:

  • If you encounter a creation error, try setting CloudFormation to preserve resources instead of rollback so you can check the troublesome resources
  • Disable LetsEncrypt certificate requests (UseLetsEncryptTLS set to False), until you're happy that it's working to avoid running into the certificate issuance limit
  • Add your IP to the Inbound rules of the created Security Group (if you didn't already during the CloudFormation config)
  • Grab the EC2's IP from the EC2 web console details
  • Open up PuTTy or similar, connect to the IP using the SSH keypair (I'd recommend to only accept the key once, rather than accept always, as you may end up destroying this instance)
  • Check the setup logs
    • sudo tail -f /tmp/foundry-setup.log if setup scripts are still running, or
    • sudo cat /tmp/foundry-setup.log | less if setup scripts have finished running

Hopefully that gives you some insight in what's going on...

LetsEncrypt TLS Issuance Limits

Should you run into the allowed LetsEncrypt TLS requests of 5 requests per Fully Qualified Domain Name, per week, you'll need to wait one week before trying again. You can still access your instance over non-secure http.

After a week, you can re-run the issuance request manually, or if you haven't done anything major, you may just tear down the CloudFormation stack and start over.