Deploying Django project to Elastic Beanstalk part 1

What is Elastic Beanstalk? 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.

How do you deploy your code to Elastic Beanstalk?

There are two ways to deploy your Django project to Elastic Beanstalk. The first method is through the AWS console and the other way is through the Elastic Beanstalk command line tool. In this blog, I will be showing you how to deploy the Django project through the AWS console. I assume that you already have a working Django project.

Creating a zip of your code

   1. Create a folder '.ebextension' in your Django root folder.
   2. Create a config file in this folder and name it Django.config (name doesn't matter, the extension should be .config).
   3. Add the following content in this file:

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:python:
    WSGIPath: django_project_name/wsgi.py

    4. Replace django_project_name with the name of your Django project.

    5. Add a requirements.txt file in your Django project root folder and put the name of all the required libraries there. You can do the by executing the following command:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

    6. Create a zip of your Django root folder and make sure that .ebextentions folder is in zip.

Uploading your code to elastic beanstalk

1. Go the Elastic Beanstalk page on AWS console.
2. Click on get started
3. Give a name to your application
4. Set its platform to python
5. Select upload your code and upload the zip file that you created in the previous step.
6. Click on 'create application'.

It will take a few minutes to create an environment for your app.

There is an option to configure more settings before you create an application but you can change these configurations anytime so, for now, let's just leave that. These configurations are for things like setting up load-balancer, attaching databases, setting environment variables.

Redeploying previous version of your code

Whenever you deploy(upload) your code to Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Beanstalk keeps track of different deployments. So anytime if you feel like the new code you deployed is not good and you want to revert to the previous version you can just select the version from AWS Elastic Beanstalk console. To do this go to your environments homepage on Elastic Beanstalk and click on upload and deploy button in the middle of the screen.

After you click on upload and deploy, click on application versions page. This will show you the list of your previous deployments from which you can select any one and deploy it again.

Troubleshooting

If you get the error Your WSGIPath refers to a file that does not exist. Go to the Django.config file in .ebextensions folder and make sure that the WSGI path is right.

You can see the logs as well to get detailed info of what is happening on the EC2 instance that Elastic Beanstalk creates to run your code. There are two ways to see the logs. First and the easy way is to go to the environment webpage you just created. On the left-hand side, you will see that there is a Logs option, click on it and then on request logs, and then you can select whether you want last 100 lines or the complete logs. The second way is to ssh into the underlying EC2 instance and see the logs. I will tell you how to do this in the second part where I also write about how to deploy your Django project through the command line.