Thanks and Credits

Parts of this configuration were contributed by Andrei Pozolotin

In particular, this doc was exponsored by expinia.

Key Concepts

In Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, an Application Version binds three values: Its name, the Version Label, AND the S3 Source

That said, you can't simply upload a new s3 object and ask it to update - You need to create a new for each new version, or update the version to the S3 source.

If you want to be able to issue rollbacks, creating a new version is a good idea, so we are going to discuss this approach.

In maven terms, this could be done via the maven.build.timestamp variable. So start declaring its format:

<properties>
    <maven.build.timestamp.format>yyyyMMddHHmmss</maven.build.timestamp.format>
    <beanstalk.versionLabel>${maven.build.timestamp}</beanstalk.versionLabel>
</properties>

Next, you can declare the plugin itself:

  <plugin>
    <groupId>br.com.ingenieux</groupId>
    <artifactId>beanstalk-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
      <applicationName>name of your application</applicationName>
      <cnamePrefix>name of your cnamePrefix</cnamePrefix><!-- cnamePrefix.elasticbeanstalk.com -->
      <environmentName>name of your environment</environmentName>
      <s3Bucket>your-s3-bucket</s3Bucket><!-- Remember to create the s3 bucket :) -->
      <s3Key>${project.artifactId}/${project.build.finalName}-${beanstalk.versionLabel}.war</s3Key>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

Then you can create the application version and launch its environment:

mvn beanstalk:upload-source-bundle beanstalk:create-application-version beanstalk:create-environment

You can either go to the console and watch for its completion and/or chain the wait-for-environment instead:

mvn beanstalk:wait-for-environment

It will wait by default up to 20 mins (in average, EC2 launches take about 7-12 mins)

Integration with your CI agent

Once you launched the environment, you can create new application versions by issuing the following goals:

1. upload-source-bundle
2. create-application-version
3. update-environment

   mvn beanstalk:upload-source-bundle beanstalk:create-application-version beanstalk:update-environment

   Or you can bind them to the lifecycle:

   <plugin>
     <groupId>br.com.ingenieux</groupId>
     <artifactId>beanstalk-maven-plugin</artifactId>
     <configuration>
       <...>
     </configuration>
     <executions>
       <execution>
         <phase>verify</phase>
         <goals>
           <goal>upload-source-bundle</goal>
           <goal>create-application-version</goal>
           <goal>update-environment</goal>
         </goals>
       </execution>
     </executions>
   </plugin>

   You can tweak the settings in the console. In particular, we recommend pointing the health check url to an static html file.

Deleting Previous Versions

You could also use clean-previous-versions, either with days or a count. There is a third argument, dryRun, which is set by default to true, in order to avoid mistakes

mvn beanstalk:clean-previous-versions -Dbeanstalk.daysToKeep=1 

Or:

mvn beanstalk:clean-previous-versions -Dbeanstalk.versionsToKeep=1 

When secure enough, simply set the dryRun parameter as false:

mvn beanstalk:clean-previous-versions -Dbeanstalk.versionsToKeep=1 -Dbeanstalk.dryRun=false