Deploying a Docker container to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

In my previous post, I looked at using the EB cli to deploy a Spring Boot app to Beanstalk. If you have an app that you have packaged in a Docker container, you can prepare this for deployment to Beanstalk using the EB cli command:

$ eb init -p docker application-name

This is described in the docs here.

This command inits the app for deployment, creating a default .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml file that looks like this:

branch-defaults:
  default:
    environment: null
    group_suffix: null
global:
  application_name: beanstalk-docker-with-mounted-volume
  branch: null
  default_ec2_keyname: null
  default_platform: Docker
  default_region: us-west-2
  include_git_submodules: true
  instance_profile: null
  platform_name: null
  platform_version: null
  profile: null
  repository: null
  sc: null
  workspace_type: Application

Next create a Beanstalk environment for deploying your app:

$ eb create environment-name

This will take a few minutes on your first deploy as it provisions everything required for running your app on Beanstalk, including an Auto Scaling Group and an EC2 instance.