PHP application deployment with elastic beanstalk

Question

I've got a Laravel 5.1 PHP application that uses composer as PHP dependency manager and npm as JavaScript dependency manger, so far so good.

I want to have a live version of this application and I want automatic deployment with ElasticBeanstalk, I've created a confi file that looks like the following:

files:
  /opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/pre/11_build.sh:
    group: root
    mode: "000755"
    owner: root
    content: |
        #!/usr/bin/env bash
        set -xe
        . /opt/elasticbeanstalk/support/envvars
        EB_APP_STAGING_DIR=$(/opt/elasticbeanstalk/bin/get-config  container -k app_staging_dir)
        cd $EB_APP_STAGING_DIR
        php artisan migrate --env="local"
        yum -y --enablerepo=epel install nodejs npm
        npm install -g gulp
        npm install 
        gulp --production 

    option_settings:
      -
        namespace: "aws:elasticbeanstalk:command"
        option_name: Timeout
        value: 1600

this set sometime works and sometime it will take more than 30 mins to complete and elasticbeanstalk triggers a timeout error

Now the reason the following block is there

yum -y --enablerepo=epel install nodejs npm
npm install -g gulp

is because if the app needs to scale to multiple servers node can potentially be not installed and that will install node for me

Now my question is: Am I doing it right? Is that the correct way to tackle automatic deployment? sometime the deployment will take more than 30 minutes to execute, is it normal? can I improve my deployment? I very like to type "eb deploy" and everything will go live!

Answer 1

You should be able to use the environment configuration options for this rather than writing a bash file yourself:

Customising software on linux servers

This will allow you do something like this:

packages: 
  yum:
    nodejs: [] 
    npm: []

However:

Elastic Beanstalk currently supports the following package managers: yum, rubygems, python, and rpm

So you'll still need to do the npm install gulp , ... manually