Setting configuration options before environment creation

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a large number of configuration options that let you modify the settings that are applied to resources in your environment. Several of these options have default values that can be overridden to customize your environment. Other options can be configured to enable additional features.

Elastic Beanstalk supports two methods of saving configuration option settings. Configuration files in YAML or JSON format can be included in your application's source code in a directory named .ebextensions and deployed as part of your application source bundle. You create and manage configuration files locally.

Saved configurations are templates that you create from a running environment or JSON options file and store in Elastic Beanstalk. Existing saved configurations can also be extended to create a new configuration.

Options can also be specified in a JSON document and provided directly to Elastic Beanstalk when you create or update an environment with the EB CLI or AWS CLI. Options provided directly to Elastic Beanstalk in this manner override all other methods.

For a full list of available options, see Configuration options.

Configuration files (.ebextensions)

Use .ebextensions to configure options that are required to make your application work, and provide default values for other options that can be overridden at a higher level of precedence. Options specified in .ebextensions have the lowest level of precedence and are overridden by settings at any other level.

To use configuration files, create a folder named .ebextensions at the top level of your project's source code. Add a file with the extension .config and specify options in the following manner:

option_settings:
  - namespace:  namespace
    option_name:  option name
    value:  option value
  - namespace:  namespace
    option_name:  option name
    value:  option value

For example, the following configuration file sets the application's health check url to /health:

healthcheckurl.config

option_settings:
  - namespace:  aws:elasticbeanstalk:application
    option_name:  Application Healthcheck URL
    value:  /health

In JSON:

{
 "option_settings" :
    [
      {
        "namespace" : "aws:elasticbeanstalk:application",
        "option_name" : "Application Healthcheck URL",
        "value" : "/health"
      }
    ]
}

This configures the Elastic Load Balancing load balancer in your Elastic Beanstalk environment to make an HTTP request to the path /health to each EC2 instance to determine if it is healthy or not.

Include the .ebextensions directory in your Application Source Bundle and deploy it to a new or existing Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Configuration files support several sections in addition to option_settings for customizing the software and files that run on the servers in your environment. For more information, see .Ebextensions.

Saved configurations

Create a saved configuration to save settings that you have applied to an existing environment during or after environment creation by using the Elastic Beanstalk console, EB CLI, or AWS CLI. Saved configurations belong to an application and can be applied to new or existing environments for that application.

Elastic Beanstalk console

Saved configurations are stored in the Elastic Beanstalk S3 bucket in a folder named after your application. For example, configurations for an application named my-app in the us-west-2 region for account number 123456789012 can be found at s3://elasticbeanstalk-us-west-2-123456789012/resources/templates/my-app.

EB CLI

The EB CLI also provides subcommands for interacting with saved configurations under eb config:

AWS CLI

Create a saved configuration from a running environment with aws elasticbeanstalk create-configuration-template

Elastic Beanstalk saves the configuration to your Elastic Beanstalk bucket in Amazon S3.

JSON document

If you use the AWS CLI to create and update environments, you can also provide configuration options in JSON format. A library of configuration files in JSON is useful if you use the AWS CLI to create and manage environments.

For example, the following JSON document sets the application's health check url to /health:

~/ebconfigs/healthcheckurl.json

[
  {
    "Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:application",
    "OptionName": "Application Healthcheck URL",
    "Value": "/health"
  }
]

EB CLI configuration

In addition to supporting saved configurations and direct environment configuration with eb config commands, the EB CLI has a configuration file with an option named default_ec2_keyname that you can use to specify an Amazon EC2 key pair for SSH access to the instances in your environment. The EB CLI uses this option to set the EC2KeyName configuration option in the aws:autoscaling:launchconfiguration namespace.

~/workspace/my-app/.elasticbeanstalk/config.yml

branch-defaults:
  master:
    environment: my-env
  develop:
    environment: my-env-dev
deploy:
  artifact: ROOT.war
global:
  application_name: my-app
  default_ec2_keyname: my-keypair
  default_platform: Tomcat 8 Java 8
  default_region: us-west-2
  profile: null
  sc: git