Deploying Django project to Elastic Beanstalk part 2

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.

In this post, I will be showing you how to deploy your code to elastic Beanstalk through the command line.

Setting up AWS Elastic Beanstalk command line tool

AWS has a command line tool for its elastic beanstalk service which you can install by running the following command.

pip install awsebcli

But before you do this, you should install aws cli.
Please see my previous post named Creating EC2 instance with AWS CLI  to see how to install and setup AWS CLI.

Deploying your code

Creating the configurations and requirements file

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

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

• Replace django_project_name with the name of your Django project.

Elastic Beanstalk uses the requirements.txt file to see which python modules you are using. So put all of the modules you are using in the requirements.txt file and put this file in the root folder of your django code. You can do the by executing the following command:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Setting up git

AWS EB CLI uses git to track which files it should use for the deployment package. So all the files that you want to deploy should be added to git and the changes must be committed.
Go to the root folder of your django code
Execute the following commands to initialize the folder with git.

git init
git add . 
git commit -m "your commit message"

Please note that git add .  will add all the files in current folder and its subfolders. If you don't want this add the files that you don't want to include in a .gitignore file or add each file you want in the deployment package manually one by one.

Once you are done with the git you need to initialize the directory with Elastic Beanstalk as well and then create an environment in it.

Initializing Elastic Beanstalk

Execute the following command to initialize:

eb init

When you execute this command it will ask you for the options like application name, region etc. The first option you have to enter is the default region where you want your Elastic Beanstalk to be located. You should select a region that is close to the place where your website will be used the most as it would improve its load time. If you plan to set up a content delivery network for your website the region doesn't matter much.

 The second thing you have to set up is the application to use. This is the application on Elastic Beanstalk. If you already have an application where you want to deploy the code select it from the list otherwise select create new application.

Set up the language you are using. As we are setting this up for Django it will be python. It will automatically detect that and you just need to confirm it and provide the python version you are using for your Django project.

Setting up SSH. If you want to ssh into the EC2 which gets created by the Elastic Beanstalk select yes from the options. From my experience, I have found it really helpful to ssh into the EC2 to see live logs(tail -f). Enter the name of the key file that will be used to SSH into the EC2. This file will be saved in your .SSH folder.

Creating an Environment

Use eb create command to create an environment. You will be asked to enter your environment name and the load balancer type. Set the name to whatever you want and the load balancer type to classic. You can learn more about load balancers here.
Once you do this your code will be deployed to Elastic Beanstalk. This may take a few minutes. Once done you can use eb open to open the Django project in web browser.

Updating your code 

Add the changes you made in your code to git and commit them.
Use eb deploy to deploy the latest code.

Troubleshooting

Checking the logs

There are two ways to see the logs. The first way is to use the command eb logs and the logs will be displayed in ther terminal. The second way is to ssh( eb SSH) into the EC2 and see the logs with tail, nano etc.