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Upload Elastic Beanstalk Application using Maven

by Max Rohde,

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is well established service of the AWS cloud and can be used as a powerful platform to deploy applications in various languages. In this short tutorial, I will outline how to conveniently deploy a Tomcat application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the beanstalk-maven-plugin.

The following assumes that you already have a project which is configured to be deployed as WAR and provides a valid web.xml to start answering requests. If you are unsure of how to set this up, please have a look at the example project web-api-example-v2 (on GitHub).

Step 1: Create IAM User

  • Create a new user on IAM user AWS for programmatic access

iam

  • For Permissions, select 'Attach existing policies directly' and add the following policy

elastic

  • Save the access key and secret key

Step 2: Add Server to Local Maven Configuration

  • Add the following declaration in the element in your $HOME/.m2/settings.xml and provide the access key and secret key for the the user you've just created


<server>
  <id>aws.amazon.com</id>
  <username>[aws access key]</username>
  <password>[aws secret key]</password>
</server>

Step 3: Add Beanstalk Maven Plugin



<plugin>
  <groupId>br.com.ingenieux</groupId>
  <artifactId>beanstalk-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.5.0</version>
</plugin>
  • Test your security credentials and connection to AWS


mvn beanstalk:check-availability -Dbeanstalk.cnamePrefix=test-war

Step 4: Create S3 Bucket for Application

  • Create a new S3 bucket with a name of your choice (e.g. the name of your application)

bucket

Step 5: Update Plugin Configuration

  • Provide the following configuration for the beanstalk-maven-plugin

<plugin>
  <groupId>br.com.ingenieux</groupId>
  <artifactId>beanstalk-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.5.0</version>
  <configuration>
    <applicationName>[Provide your application name]</applicationName>
    <!-- Path of the deployed application: cnamePrefix.us-east-1.elasticbeanstalk.com -->
    <cnamePrefix>${project.artifactId}</cnamePrefix>
    <environmentName>devenv</environmentName>
    <environmentRef>devenv</environmentRef>
    <solutionStack>64bit Amazon Linux 2015.03 v1.4.5 running Tomcat 8 Java 8</solutionStack>

    <!-- Bucket name here equal to artifactId - but this is not guaranteed      to be available, so therefore the bucket name is given statically -->
    <s3Bucket>[Provide your S3 bucket name]</s3Bucket>
    <s3Key>${project.artifactId}/${project.build.finalName}-${maven.build.timestamp}.war</s3Key>
    <versionLabel>${project.version}</versionLabel>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

Step 6: Deploy project

  • Run the following to upload the project to the S3 bucket:

mvn beanstalk:upload-source-bundle
  • If this succeeds, deploy the application


mvn beanstalk:upload-source-bundle beanstalk:create-application-version beanstalk:create-environment

Your application should now be deployed to Elastic Beanstalk. It will be available under



cname.us-east-1.elasticbeanstalk.com

Where cname is the cname you have specified in step 5

Good To Know

  • To find out, which solution stacks are available (to define the solutionStack environment variable), simply run


mvn beanstalk:list-stacks

References