Deploying Medusa Backend on AWS with Terraform and GitHub Actions

Introduction

In today’s world of headless commerce, developers need reliable backends that can scale with demand. Medusa is an open-source headless commerce engine that lets you build customizable e-commerce platforms.

In this project, I automated the deployment of Medusa on AWS ECS (Fargate) using Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. This means with a single push to GitHub, Terraform provisions the infrastructure, Docker builds the image, and Medusa is deployed seamlessly on AWS.

👉 Full code is available on GitHub: Medusa Project Repo

---

🏗️ Architecture Overview

Here’s the cloud infrastructure we provision using Terraform:

• AWS ECS (Fargate) – Runs the Medusa backend in containers

• Amazon ECR – Stores Medusa Docker images

• Application Load Balancer (ALB) – Routes traffic to ECS tasks

• VPC with Subnets – Secure networking setup

• IAM Roles – Permissions for ECS and GitHub Actions

• GitHub Actions – Automates build → push → deploy workflow

---

📂 Project Structure

medusa-project/
├── vpc.tf
├── ecs.tf
├── alb.tf
├── iam.tf
├── ecr.tf
├── security-group.tf
├── provider.tf
├── variable.tf
├── output.tf
├── data.tf
├── taskdefinition.json
├── Dockerfile
├── package.json
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── deploy.yml
└── README.md

---

⚙️ Prerequisites

• AWS Account with IAM user (programmatic access)

• GitHub repository

• Terraform installed

• AWS CLI installed & configured

• Docker installed

---

🔑 GitHub Secrets

Before using GitHub Actions, add the following secrets in your repository:

---

🚀 Steps to Deploy

1. Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/Harshalv21/Terraform-Projects.git
cd Medusa-project

2. Initialize Terraform

terraform init

3. Plan Infrastructure

terraform plan

4. Apply Infrastructure (⚠️ will incur AWS charges)

terraform apply

5. Trigger GitHub Actions

Push changes to main branch → GitHub Actions workflow (deploy.yml) will:

1. Build Docker image

2. Push to Amazon ECR

3. Update ECS service with the new Medusa task

---

🛠️ Customization (if you want)

• Modify Dockerfile and package.json for your Medusa configuration.

• Extend Terraform code to include RDS (Postgres), S3, or Route53 for DNS.

• Add monitoring (CloudWatch, Prometheus) for production use.

---

✅ Project Status

• Terraform infra files ✅

• GitHub Actions CI/CD ✅

• Deployment workflow ready ✅

• Deployment skipped in repo (to avoid AWS charges) ⚠️

---

💡 Key Learnings

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform makes deployment reproducible.

• GitHub Actions enables seamless CI/CD pipelines for AWS deployments.

• Medusa can be containerized and deployed like any modern microservice.

---

🔗 Resources

• GitHub Repo

• Medusa Docs

• Terraform AWS Provider

• GitHub Actions Docs