Laravel Elastic Beanstalk

Laravel EB is a sample configuration to help you deploy a Laravel app on an AWS Elastic Beanstalk PHP environment without any super rockety-like knowledge.

Amazon Linux 2

This branch is working with the new Amazon Linux 2.

It's highly recommended to upgrade to the Amazon Linux 2 version, since it's faster and more secure. (see AWS's announcement)

To upgrade to AL2 from your Amazon Linux AMI, please see the Amazon Linux 2 migration guide

If you still work with Amazon Linux AMI, please switch to the amazon-ami branch to read the older docs.

Packaged

The sample configuration comes with:

• Automation for copying .env file from AWS EB's S3 bucket (so you won't have to add the env variables from the AWS Console)
• Laravel Artisan Scheduler CRON configuration
• Supervisor for Queues
• HTTP to HTTPS support
• Nginx configuration support
• Chromium binary

Updating

The repo works with semantic versioning, so please check the Releases page for latest updates & changes.

Installation

Clone the repo and drop the .ebextensions and .platform folders in your root project.

Make sure that the .sh files from the .platform folder are executable before deploying your project:

$ chmod +x .platform/hooks/prebuild/*.sh

$ chmod +x .platform/hooks/predeploy/*.sh

$ chmod +x .platform/hooks/postdeploy/*.sh

$ chmod +x .platform/scripts/*.sh

AWS EB Should-Know

Deployment Stages

Elastic Beanstalk helps you deploy apps while keeping them up, so you won't have to turn your app down during deployments. For this, there are two paths:

• /var/app/staging that holds the app between deployments. This folder is not pointed to until the deployment finishes
• /var/app/current that holds the live app and that serves requests actively

Each deploy makes you lose everything you have in the current folder. DO NOT rely on local storage, use S3 instead with CloudFront to avoid data loss and speed up the things.

.ebextensions/

The .ebextensions folder contains information about which commands to run during the deployment, such as migrations or copying files in the instance.

In this repo, see 01_deploy.config for a list of commands that will be ran upon deployment.

On the other hand, the 00_copy_env_file.config will copy the .env file from your S3 bucket and put it temporarily in the /tmp folder, to later be copied in the deployment process.

Please open the files to see further comments on the particular sections and change them.

.platform/

The .platform folder contains mostly shell scripts that will be ran during the deployment, like configuring or installing software, like supervisor, or running scripts after the deployment finished.

Consider looking in the files/ folder for Supervisor and PHP custom configurations that will be automatically be applied, out-of-the-box.

Additionally, the hooks/folder contains scripts that will be ran during various deployment stages. All scripts contain comments about details and best practices, so take a look.

Please refer to this scheme to understand the execution workflow: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/images/platforms-linux-extend-order.png

Use Cases

HTTP to HTTPS

Check the .platform/nginx/conf.d/elasticbeanstalk/https.conf file to enable HTTP to HTTPS redirect.

Laravel Passport

Since Laravel Passport uses local storage to keep the public and private key, there is no way of using this method. Instead, you might use what this PR added: https://github.com/laravel/passport/pull/683

In your .env file, add the following variables and make sure that there is a \\n for each newline:

PASSPORT_PRIVATE_KEY="-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\\nMIIJJwIBAAKCAgEAw3KPag...\\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----"
PASSPORT_PUBLIC_KEY="-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\\nMIICIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOC...\\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----\\n"

Spatie Media Library & other Imagick-based packages

Some packages require Imagick to run.

To enable Imagick installation on the instance via Amazon Linux Extras, check install_imagick.sh file for details.

Memcached Auto Discovery

Memcached Auto Discovery for AWS Memcached is a PHP extension that replace the default Memcached extension, in order to use Memcached clusters in multi-node mode.

Plese see install_memcached_discovery.sh file to enable the installation for your PHP version.

For the Laravel app, edit your memcached connection in cache.php to make it suitable for multi-node configuration:

'memcached' => [
    'driver' => 'memcached',
    
    'persistent_id' => env('MEMCACHED_PERSISTENT_ID', 1), // make sure you also set a default to the persistent_id
    
    'options' => array_merge([
        Memcached::OPT_DISTRIBUTION => Memcached::DISTRIBUTION_CONSISTENT,
        Memcached::OPT_LIBKETAMA_COMPATIBLE => true,
        Memcached::OPT_SERIALIZER => Memcached::SERIALIZER_PHP,
    ], in_array(env('APP_ENV'), ['production', 'staging']) ? [
        Memcached::OPT_CLIENT_MODE => Memcached::DYNAMIC_CLIENT_MODE,
    ] : []),
]

For production & staging workloads (when AWS Elasticache is used), Memcached::OPT_CLIENT_MODE should be set. OPT_CLIENT_MODE and DYNAMIC_CLIENT_MODE are Memcached Auto Discovery extension-related constants, not available in the default Memcached extension.

Chromium binary support

Some Laravel apps, like crawlers, might need a Chrome binary to run upon. A good example is spatie/browsershot. It lets you take browser screenshots using PHP and a Chromium binary.

To install Chromium, seek for the install_latest_chromium_binary.sh script and uncomment the code.

The binary can be then accessed from /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable

Run on Spot Instances

Spot instances are the cheapest EC2 instances from AWS, but they can be terminated anytime. Please refer to this to understand how they can be used: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-spot-instances.html

Spot instances can be configured from the console. Check out AWS announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/aws-elastic-beanstalk-adds-support-for-amazon-ec2-spot-instances/

Multi-environment

Sometimes you might have more than one environment, for example production and staging. Having duplicate configuration can be tricky, but you can workaround this problem by seeking a CloudFromation-like appoach as presented in one of the issues: https://github.com/rennokki/laravel-aws-eb/issues/30#issuecomment-693154271

The idea behind it is to use, for example, {"Ref": "AWSEBEnvironmentName"} value to concatenate to the name of the .env file that should be downloaded from S3. This way, you can have .env.staging-app if your AWS EB environment is named staging-app.

Deploying from the CI/CD Pipeline

To deploy to the EB environment, you have two choices:

• Archive the ZIP by your own and upload it.
• Pull from git, and use AWS EB CLI in the current folder (with no additional ZIP-ing)

AWS EB CLI make use of .gitignore and .ebignore. The only pre-configuration you need is to add the following environment variables to your CI/CD machine:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_EB_REGION

If you use a dockerized CI/CD pipeline (like Gitlab CI), you can make use of the renokico/aws-cli:latest image.

The following commands let you deploy an app on a certain environment within Gitlab CI on tag creation, for example:

$ git checkout $CI_COMMIT_TAG

$ eb init --region=$AWS_EB_REGION --platform=php [project-name]

$ eb use [environment-name]

$ eb deploy [environment-name] --label=$CI_COMMIT_TAG