Deploying a rails application to Elastic Beanstalk - AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWSDocumentationAWS Elastic BeanstalkDeveloper Guide
PrerequisitesLaunch an Elastic Beanstalk environmentInstall rails and generate a websiteConfigure rails settingsDeploy your applicationCleanupNext steps
Deploying a rails application to Elastic Beanstalk
Rails is an open source, model-view-controller (MVC) framework for Ruby. This tutorial
walks you through the process of generating a Rails application
and deploying it to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment.
Sections
Prerequisites
Launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment
Install rails and generate a website
Configure rails settings
Deploy your application
Cleanup
Next steps
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes you have knowledge of the basic Elastic Beanstalk operations
and the Elastic Beanstalk console. If you haven't already, follow the instructions
in Getting started using Elastic Beanstalk to launch your first Elastic Beanstalk environment.
To follow the procedures in this guide, you will need a command line terminal or shell
to run commands. Commands are shown in
listings preceded by a
prompt symbol ($) and the name of the current directory, when appropriate.
~/eb-project$ this is a command
this is outputOn Linux and macOS, use your preferred shell and package manager. On Windows 10, you
can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux to get a Windows-integrated version of
Ubuntu and Bash.
The Rails framework has the following dependencies. Be sure you have all of them installed.
Ruby 2.2.2 or newer – For installation instructions, see Setting up your Ruby development environment.
In this tutorial we use Ruby 2.5.1 and the corresponding Elastic Beanstalk platform
version.
Node.js – For installation instructions, see Installing Node.js via package manager.
Yarn – For installation instructions, see Installation on the Yarn website.
Launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment
Use the Elastic Beanstalk console to create an Elastic Beanstalk environment. Choose
the Ruby platform and accept the default settings and sample
code.
To launch an environment (console)
Open the Elastic Beanstalk console using this preconfigured link: console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/home#/newApplication?applicationName=tutorials&environmentType=LoadBalanced
For Platform, select the platform and platform branch that match the language used by your application.
For Application code, choose Sample application.
Choose Review and launch.
Review the available options. Choose the available option you want to use, and when
you're ready, choose Create app.
Environment creation takes about 5 minutes and creates the following resources:
EC2 instance – An Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) virtual
machine configured to run web apps on the platform that you choose.
Each platform runs a specific set of software, configuration files, and scripts to
support a specific language version, framework, web container, or
combination of these. Most platforms use either Apache or NGINX as a reverse proxy
that sits in front of your web app, forwards requests to it, serves
static assets, and generates access and error logs.
Instance security group – An Amazon EC2 security group configured to allow inbound traffic on port 80. This
resource lets HTTP traffic from the load balancer reach the EC2 instance running your
web app. By default, traffic isn't allowed on other ports.
Load balancer – An Elastic Load Balancing load balancer configured to distribute requests to the
instances running your
application. A load balancer also eliminates the need to expose your instances directly
to the internet.
Load balancer security group – An Amazon EC2 security group configured to allow inbound traffic on port 80. This
resource lets HTTP traffic from the internet reach the load balancer. By default,
traffic isn't allowed on other ports.
Auto Scaling group – An Auto Scaling group configured to replace
an instance if it is terminated or becomes unavailable.
Amazon S3 bucket – A storage location for your source
code, logs, and other artifacts that are created when you use Elastic Beanstalk.
Amazon CloudWatch alarms – Two CloudWatch alarms that monitor the load on the instances in your environment
and that are
triggered if the load is too high or too low. When an alarm is triggered, your Auto
Scaling group scales up or down in response.
AWS CloudFormation stack – Elastic Beanstalk uses AWS CloudFormation to launch the
resources in your environment and propagate configuration changes. The resources are
defined
in a template that you can view in the AWS CloudFormation
console.
Domain name – A domain name that routes to your
web app in the form
subdomain.region.elasticbeanstalk.com.
All of these resources are managed by Elastic Beanstalk. When you terminate your environment,
Elastic Beanstalk terminates all the resources that it contains.
Note
The Amazon S3 bucket that Elastic Beanstalk creates is shared between environments
and is not deleted during environment termination. For more information, see Using Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon S3.
Install rails and generate a website
Install Rails and its dependencies with the gem command.
~$ gem install rails
Fetching: concurrent-ruby-1.0.5.gem (100%)
Successfully installed concurrent-ruby-1.0.5
Fetching: i18n-1.0.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed i18n-1.0.1
...
Test your Rails installation.
~$ rails --version
Rails 5.2.0
Use rails new with the name of the application to create a new Rails project.
~$ rails new ~/eb-rails
Rails creates a directory with the name specified, generates all of the files needed
to run a sample project locally, and then runs bundler to install
all of the dependencies (Gems) defined in the project's Gemfile.
Test your Rails installation by running the default project locally.
~$ cd eb-rails
eb-rails $ rails server
=> Booting Puma
=> Rails 5.2.0 application starting in development
=> Run `rails server -h` for more startup options
Puma starting in single mode...
* Version 3.11.4 (ruby 2.5.1-p57), codename: Love Song
* Min threads: 5, max threads: 5
* Environment: development
* Listening on tcp://0.0.0.0:3000
Use Ctrl+C to stop
...
Open http://localhost:3000 in a web browser to see the default project in action.
This page is only visible in development mode. Add some content to the front page
of the application to support production deployment to Elastic Beanstalk. Use
rails generate to create a controller, route, and view for your welcome page.
~/eb-rails$ rails generate controller WelcomePage welcome
create app/controllers/welcome_page_controller.rb
route get 'welcome_page/welcome'
invoke erb
create app/views/welcome_page
create app/views/welcome_page/welcome.html.erb
invoke test_unit
create test/controllers/welcome_page_controller_test.rb
invoke helper
create app/helpers/welcome_page_helper.rb
invoke test_unit
invoke assets
invoke coffee
create app/assets/javascripts/welcome_page.coffee
invoke scss
create app/assets/stylesheets/welcome_page.scss.
This gives you all you need to access the page at /welcome_page/welcome. Before you publish the changes, however, change the content in
the view and add a route to make this page appear at the top level of the site.
Use a text editor to edit the content in app/views/welcome_page/welcome.html.erb. For this example, you'll use cat
to simply overwrite the content of the existing file.
Example app/views/welcome_page/welcome.html.erb
Welcome!
This is the front page of my first Rails application on Elastic Beanstalk.
Finally, add the following route to config/routes.rb:
Example config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
get 'welcome_page/welcome'
root 'welcome_page#welcome'
This tells Rails to route requests to the root of the website to the welcome page
controller's welcome method, which renders the content in the
welcome view (welcome.html.erb).
Configure rails settings
Use the Elastic Beanstalk console to configure Rails with environment properties.
Set the SECRET_KEY_BASE environment property to a string of up to
256 alphanumeric characters.
Rails uses this property to create keys. Therefore you should keep it a secret and
not store it in source control in plain text. Instead, you provide
it to Rails code on your environment through an environment property.
To configure environment properties in the Elastic Beanstalk console
Open the Elastic Beanstalk console,
and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.
In the navigation pane, choose Environments, and then choose the name of your environment from the list.
Note
If you have many environments, use the search bar to filter the environment list.
In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.
In the Software configuration category, choose Edit.
Under Environment properties, enter key-value pairs.
Choose Apply.
Now you're ready to deploy the site to your environment.
Deploy your application
Create a source bundle containing the files created by Rails. The following command creates a source
bundle named rails-default.zip.
~/eb-rails$ zip ../rails-default.zip -r * .[^.]*
Upload the source bundle to Elastic Beanstalk to deploy Rails to your environment.
To deploy a source bundle
Open the Elastic Beanstalk console,
and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.
In the navigation pane, choose Environments, and then choose the name of your environment from the list.
Note
If you have many environments, use the search bar to filter the environment list.
On the environment overview page, choose Upload and deploy.
Use the on-screen dialog box to upload the source bundle.
Choose Deploy.
When the deployment completes, you can choose the site URL to open your website in
a new tab.
Cleanup
When you finish working with Elastic Beanstalk, you can terminate your environment.
Elastic Beanstalk terminates all AWS resources associated with your environment, such
as
Amazon EC2 instances,
database instances,
load balancers,
security groups,
and alarms.
To terminate your Elastic Beanstalk environment
Open the Elastic Beanstalk console,
and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.
In the navigation pane, choose Environments, and then choose the name of your environment from the list.
Note
If you have many environments, use the search bar to filter the environment list.
Choose Environment actions, and then choose Terminate
environment.
Use the on-screen dialog box to confirm environment termination.
With Elastic Beanstalk, you can easily create a new environment for your application
at any time.
Next steps
For more information about Rails, visit rubyonrails.org.
As you continue to develop your application, you'll probably want a way to manage
environments and deploy your application without manually creating a
.zip file and uploading it to the Elastic Beanstalk console. The Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI) provides easy-to-use commands
for creating, configuring, and deploying applications to Elastic Beanstalk environments
from the command line.
Finally, if you plan on using your application in a production environment, you will
want to configure a custom domain
name for your environment and enable HTTPS for secure connections.
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