Provisioning Dgraph

Once the CDK deploy is complete you’ll need to perform some additional manual configuration to spin up the Dgraph cluster. The CDK deploy in the previous section has created a Security Group and Instance Profile for the EC2 Instances where we’ll run the Docker Swarm cluster. It only remains to spin up the EC2 instances, provision a Docker Swarm cluster, and install Dgraph on it.

We’ll use the graplctl tool to provision Dgraph:

1. Install graplctl. See the graplctl README for installation instructions.

2. Run the graplctl dgraph create command. Note that you will either need to configure the GRAPL_REGION, GRAPL_DEPLOYMENT_NAME, and GRAPL_VERSION environment variables or supply the corresponding values via the CLI options (graplctl --help for more information). For example:

   # Specify the flags if you didn't configure the environment variables.
   graplctl \
      --grapl-region your-region-1 \
      --grapl-deployment-name your-deployment-name \
      --grapl-version your-version-usually-latest \
      dgraph create \
        --instance-type i3.large
   

## DGraph operations

You can manage the DGraph cluster with the docker swarm tooling by
logging into one of the swarm manager with SSM. If you forget which
instances are the swarm managers, you can find them by running
`graplctl swarm managers`. For your convenience, `graplctl` also
provides an `exec` command you can use to run a bash command remotely
on a swarm manager. For example, to list all the nodes in the Dgraph
swarm you can run something like the following:

``` bash
graplctl swarm exec --swarm-id my-swarm-id -- docker node ls

If you forget which swarm-id is associated with your Dgraph cluster, you may list all the swarm IDs in your deployment by running graplctl swarm ls.