Adding our template to a source control system

Now that we have tested our template and know it's working, we are going to commit it to our source control system. This will allow us to keep track of changes, making it possible to treat our infrastructure code at the same standard as our application code (more on this in Chapter 5, Adding Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment).

To do that, we will rely on Git. AWS has a service called AWS CodeCommit (http://amzn.to/2tKUj0n), which lets you manage Git repositories easily. However, because this service is a lot less popular than GitHub (https://github.com), we will instead use the latter. If you don't have an account for GitHub yet, start by signing up for the service—it's completely free.

Once logged into GitHub, create a new repository for the CloudFormation template:

1. In your browser, open https://github.com/new.
2. Call the new repository the following: EffectiveDevOpsTemplates.
3. Check the Initialize this repository with a README checkbox.
4. Finally, click on the Create repository button, as shown here:

5. Once your repository is created, you will want to clone it into your computer. For that, you need to have Git installed (search on Google for instructions on how to install Git for your operating system if you don't have it yet). For CentOS, you just need to run yum -y install git, as the Git package is a part of Linux distribution now:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your_github_username>/EffectiveDevOpsTemplates  

6. Now that the repository is cloned, we will go into it and copy the template previously created in the new GitHub repository:

$ cd EffectiveDevOpsTemplates
$ cp <path_to_helloworld_template>/helloworld-cf-template.py .

7. Finally, we will add and commit that new file to our project and push it to GitHub as follows:

$ git add helloworld-cf-template.py
$ git commit -m "Adding helloworld Troposphere template"
$ git push