Deploying an Application to Elastic Beanstalk via CircleCi 2.1 and TravisCI

Testing and Deploying to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk via CircleCi 2.1

After scouring the internet for a straight-forward way to deploy my application to Elastic beanstalk via circleCI, I figured I could help others trying to do the same with this post. Do checkout ryansimms on github as this method is based off his method for CircleCI 2.0 which was my starting point to get this working.

First setup an AWS IAM user by following these steps (a unique user for CircleCI is recommended)

• On AWS services search for IAM
• Select Users (or User Groups if you wish to group deployment users together, eg. TravisCI and CircleCI)
• Under users, Click on 'Add User'
• Set a username and only tick Access key - Programmatic access as the Access type
• Click on next (Set permissions), and select 'Attach existing policies directly', then search for and select AdministratorAccess-AWSElasticBeanstalk, and AmazonS3FullAccess. Note: This used to be just AWSElasticBeanstalkFullAccess, but that's since been deprecated >Make sure to copy the user's Access-Key-ID, and Secret-Access-key to safe place.
• Click on next(Tags), next(Review) and finally 'Create User'.

Setup your Elastic Beanstalk application

• On AWS services search for Elastic Beanstalk
• 'Create a New Application' and give it your application name.
• 'Create New Environment' and name it with respect to the git branch name that it is going to host e.g. BRANCHNAME-my-application I do this as I have a staging branch and the master branch so in our EB config, we'll be replacing BRANCHNAME with the $CIRCLE_BRANCH environment variable provided by CircleCi so when deploying the staging branch for example, it will know to deploy to the staging-my-application environment on Elastic Beanstalk.
• wait for the environment to go live. after which you can view the sample application at [environment-name].[application-region].elasticbeanstalk.com

Add deployment user environment variables to CircleCi

On CircleCI, go to

• Project Settings > Environment Variables add these keys:and their values AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Add .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml config to application code

• Create this folder in the root directory of your application code
• Update the values of config.yml with the snippet ( according to your setup ).

branch-defaults:
  master:
    environment: your-app-name-$CIRCLECI_BRANCH
  develop:
    environment:  your-app-name-$CIRCLECI_BRANCH
global:
  application_name:  your-app-name
  default_platform: 64bit Amazon Linux 2/3.4.16
  default_region: your-app-region (e.g. us-east-1)
  sc: git

Note: Ensure the application_name is exactly what you called your application in Elastic Beanstalk when you did the 'Create New Application' step.

Also Note: Do not set a profile: value here, the profile will be set based on the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables you setup.

Update your .circleci/config.yml

As follows, and according to your setup

version: 2.1
jobs:
  # add commands to run your test if you have them otherwise skip this
  test-me:
    docker:
      - image: cimg/node:14.19
    steps:
      - run: my test script
  # deployment starts here
  deploy-me:
      docker:
        - image: cimg/python:3.10
      steps:
        - checkout
        - run: pip3 --version
        - run:
            working_directory: /
            name: installing ebcli
            command: pip3 install awsebcli --upgrade --user
        - run: eb --version
        - run:
            name: deploying with awsebcli
            command: eb deploy  your-app-name-$CIRCLE_BRANCH
workflows:
  test-then-deploy:
    jobs:
      - test-me
      - deploy-me:
          context: aws-creds
          filters:
            branches:
              only:
                - master
                - staging
          requires:
            - testme

Note your-app-name should be the same as the one on Elastic Beanstalk

Now we await

• Commit, Push and wait for CircleCi to finish running. If all goes well on CircleCI you should see your application updating on the Elastic Beanstalk dashboard.

Extras, -only for TravisCI users

Adding this deploy step to your .travis.yml file should ideally work

deploy:
   provider: elasticbeanstalk
   region: "us-east-1"
   app: "your-app-name"
   env: " your-app-environment-name"
   bucket: elasticbeanstalk-us-east-1-398485943999
   bucket_path: "your-app-name"
   on:
     branch: master
   access_key_id: $AWS_ACCESS_ID
   secret_access_key: $AWS_SECRET_KEY

Note: Replace us-east-1 with your application region.
Note2: AWS_ACCESS_ID and AWS_SECRET_KEY environment variables should be setup in your TravisCI dashboard.

Corrections and suggestions for better practices would of course be welcome