During the study of rails development, at some point, you may need to deploy it onto AWS Elastic Beanstalk(EB). This is what I am recently doing. Together with three other members, we are devolopping a website Bidder to bid items. This is what I did to deploy our website on EB. I used Command Line Interface(CLI) instead of console for enviroment setup.

Reference: Bryce’s instruction, AWS documents

1. Launch an EC2 instance

  1. Go to AWS console, click EC2, click launch instance
  2. Select Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09.0 (HVM), SSD Volume Type - ami-b04e92d0
  3. Select t2.micro(free tier eligible), click “review and launch”
  4. Click “edit security group”
  5. Choose “create a new security group”, use the default name
  6. Choose type “ssh”, restrict source with “myip”.
  7. Click launch
  8. Choose an existing key pair or create a new key pair

Note: instance type, security group, ssh source can be modified according to the needs

2. SSH to your instance with your key pair

  1. view your instance from AWS console, get its public DNS
  2. chmod 400 your_key_pair_name.pem
  3. ssh -i yourkeypair.pem ec2-user@your_public_DNS

3. Set up environment

1. Install the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI)

  1. pip install —upgrade —user awsebcli
  2. add the path to the executable file to your PATH (add below to ~/.bash_profile and source it) export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH
  3. verify that eb cli has been installed using eb —version

2. Make changes to your rails app, clone your git repo

  1. make changes following Bryce’s instruction
  2. install git in your EC2 instance sudo yum install git
  3. clone your git repo to your EC2 instance

3. init(configure) EB

  1. cd to your git repo
  2. run eb init
  3. select region(use default)
  4. provide your credentials
    • to get a credential
      • go to AWS console, click your name on the right side of the header, click security credentials
      • click Get Started with IAM Users( or Users on the left side bar)
      • click create new users, enter name, check generate an access key for each user
      • download the credential
    • give user permission
      • back to Users main page
      • click the user name
      • click permissions
      • click attach policy, add amazon EC2 full access, AWSElasticBeanstalkFullAccess
  5. select an application to use: choose default
  6. It seems you are using Ruby, is it correct?: choose y
  7. select platform version: 1) Ruby 2.3
  8. Do you want to set up SSH for your instances?:y
  9. Select a key pair.: choose your key pair

4. create a deployment for demo

eb create -db.engine postgres -db.i db.t2.micro -db.user u --envvars SECRET_KEY_BASE=RANDOM_SECRET --single DEPLOYMENT_NAME

Replace DEPLOYMENT_NAME with a unique name for your deployment. Consider teamname-demo.

Replace RANDOM_SECRET with some semi-random large string of alphanumeric characters. Note, for real sites you want this to be really random as your cookies are signed/encrypted using a key derived from this string.

Hit enter and type in password(at least 8 letters’ long)