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 and gives the ability to treat our infrastructure code up to the same standard as our application code. (There is more on that in Chapter 4, 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 use the latter instead. If you don't have an account for GitHub yet, start by signing up for the service (it's completely free).

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

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

1. 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):

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

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

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

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

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