Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your PHP application environment - AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Adding a DB instance to your environmentDownloading a driverConnecting to a database with a PDO or MySQLiConnecting to a database with Symfony

Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your PHP application environment

You can use an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instance to store data gathered and modified by your application. The database can be coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk, or it can be created as decoupled and managed externally by another service. This topic provides instructions to create an Amazon RDS using the Elastic Beanstalk console. The database will be coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk. For more information about integrating an Amazon RDS with Elastic Beanstalk, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Adding a DB instance to your environment

To add a DB instance to your environment

  1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console, and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.

  2. 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.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.

  4. In the Database configuration category, choose Edit.

  5. Choose a DB engine, and enter a user name and password.

  6. To save the changes choose Apply at the bottom of the page.

Adding a DB instance takes about 10 minutes. When the environment update is complete, the DB instance's hostname and other connection information are available to your application through the following environment properties:

Property name Description Property value

RDS_HOSTNAME

The hostname of the DB instance.

On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Endpoint.

RDS_PORT

The port where the DB instance accepts connections. The default value varies among DB engines.

On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Port.

RDS_DB_NAME

The database name, ebdb.

On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: DB Name.

RDS_USERNAME

The username that you configured for your database.

On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: Master username.

RDS_PASSWORD

The password that you configured for your database.

Not available for reference in the Amazon RDS console.

For more information about configuring a database instance coupled with an Elastic Beanstalk environment, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Downloading a driver

To use PHP Data Objects (PDO) to connect to the database, install the driver that matches the database engine that you chose.

For more information, see http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.installation.php.

Connecting to a database with a PDO or MySQLi

You can use $_SERVER[`VARIABLE`] to read connection information from the environment.

For a PDO, create a Data Source Name (DSN) from the host, port, and name. Pass the DSN to the constructor for the PDO with the database user name and password.

Example Connect to an RDS database with PDO - MySQL
<?php
$dbhost = $_SERVER['RDS_HOSTNAME'];
$dbport = $_SERVER['RDS_PORT'];
$dbname = $_SERVER['RDS_DB_NAME'];
$charset = 'utf8' ;

$dsn = "mysql:host={$dbhost};port={$dbport};dbname={$dbname};charset={$charset}";
$username = $_SERVER['RDS_USERNAME'];
$password = $_SERVER['RDS_PASSWORD'];

$pdo = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);
?>

For other drivers, replace mysql with the name of your driver – pgsql, oci, or sqlsrv.

For MySQLi, pass the hostname, user name, password, database name, and port to the mysqli constructor.

Example Connect to an RDS database with mysqli_connect()
$link = new mysqli($_SERVER['RDS_HOSTNAME'], $_SERVER['RDS_USERNAME'], $_SERVER['RDS_PASSWORD'], $_SERVER['RDS_DB_NAME'], $_SERVER['RDS_PORT']);

Connecting to a database with Symfony

For Symfony version 3.2 and newer, you can use %env(PROPERTY_NAME)% to set database parameters in a configuration file based on the environment properties set by Elastic Beanstalk.

Example app/config/parameters.yml
parameters:
    database_driver:   pdo_mysql
    database_host:     '%env(RDS_HOSTNAME)%'
    database_port:     '%env(RDS_PORT)%'
    database_name:     '%env(RDS_DB_NAME)%'
    database_user:     '%env(RDS_USERNAME)%'
    database_password: '%env(RDS_PASSWORD)%'

See External Parameters (Symfony 3.4) for more information.

For earlier versions of Symfony, environment variables are only accessible if they start with SYMFONY__. This means that the Elastic Beanstalk-defined environment properties are not accessible, and you must define your own environment properties to pass the connection information to Symfony.

To connect to a database with Symfony 2, create an environment property for each parameter. Then, use %property.name% to access the Symfony-transformed variable in a configuration file. For example, an environment property named SYMFONY__DATABASE__USER is accessible as database.user.

    database_user:     "%database.user%"

See External Parameters (Symfony 2.8) for more information.