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Deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the simplest managed-EC2 option for hosting ActiveManage in AWS — autoscaling, load balancing, health checks, integrated logs. This article walks through deploying.

Elastic Beanstalk dashboard showing environment health 'Ok', running version, instance count (4), load balancer, recent events including last deploy timestamp, latency graph

Initial Setup

  1. In AWS Console, create a new Elastic Beanstalk application.
  2. Choose platform: PHP (latest supported version).
  3. Pick environment type: Web server, load-balanced auto-scaling.
  4. Configure instance type (t3.medium for small, m5.large or above for production).
  5. Configure RDS in separate stack (don't use the “add database” option — it ties DB lifecycle to environment).
  6. Set up VPC with private subnet for RDS, public for EB instances.
  7. Configure environment variables: $AM_DB_HOST, $AM_STRIPE_KEY etc.
  8. Upload the deployment ZIP and deploy.

CI/CD Integration

For continuous delivery, use GitHub Actions / GitLab CI / Buildkite:

  1. On merge to main, build the deployment ZIP.
  2. Upload to S3.
  3. Create a new EB application version pointing at the S3 ZIP.
  4. Update the environment to the new version (rolling or all-at-once).
  5. Watch health checks; auto-rollback on failure.

Configuration Files

Place .ebextensions/ in the deployment ZIP for custom config:

  • 01_packages.config: Install OS packages (ImageMagick, FFmpeg).
  • 02_options.config: Tune PHP and Apache settings.
  • 03_files.config: Drop in additional config files.
  • 04_container_commands.config: Run migrations and cache-clears on deploy.

Worked Examples

  • Single-AZ small deployment: t3.medium × 2 instances behind ALB. Cheap, simple.
  • Multi-AZ production: m5.large × 3 in different AZs. Auto-scales to 8 in load spikes.
  • Blue/green: Two EB environments; swap CNAMEs to release; previous environment retained for rollback.
  • Multi-tenant prod: One EB environment serving all tenants behind ALB; per-tenant routing inside the app.
Tip: Use AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for secrets — don't embed in EB environment variables visible in console. Parameter Store integrates with IAM and supports rotation.
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