Tag Archives: terraform

Automate Your WebPageTest Private Instance With Terraform: 2021 Edition

This article assumes you have an understanding of what Terraform is, what WebPageTest is and some AWS basics.

all the logos

Have you ever wanted to have your WebPageTest setup managed as infrastructure as code, so you can keep all those carefully tuned changes and custom settings in source control, ready to confidently and repeatedly destroy and rebuild at a whim?

Sure you have.

In this article I’ll show how to script the setup of your new WPT server, installing from a base OS, and configuring customisations – all within Terraform so you can easily rebuild it with a single command.

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A Step by Step Guide to using Terraform to define an AutoScaling Private WebPageTest instance in code

Update: November 2021
This article is out of date; there are no longer WebPageTest Server AMIs, so you need to install WPT on a base OS. There is an updated article here Automate Your WebPageTest Private Instance With Terraform: 2021 Edition

WebPagetest Terraform

In a previous article I went through the steps needed to create your own private, autoscaling, WebPageTest setup in Amazon AWS. It wasn’t particularly complicated, but it was quite manual; I don’t like pointing and clicking in a GUI since I can’t easily put it in version control and run it again and again on demand.

Fortunately, whatever you create within AWS can be described using a language called CloudFormation which allows you to define your infrastructure as code.

Unfortunately it’s not easy to understand (in my opinion!) and I could never quite get my head around it, which annoyed me no end.

In this article I’ll show you how to use Terraform to define your private autoscaling WebPageTest setup in easily understandable infrastructure as code, enabling an effortless and reproducable web performance testing setup, which you can then fearlessly edit and improve!

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