Deploying your Spring Boot application on AWS Beanstalk via CLI

First of all, you should have an AWS account. If you don’t have one, please go ahead and create one — you get many of the AWS services for free for ~12 months when you create a new fresh AWS account.

Create a spring boot app from https://start.spring.io/ or via running the below command

curl https://start.spring.io/starter.zip -d dependencies=web,devtools \
-d bootVersion=2.1.9.RELEASE -o my-project.zip

Unzip the file

unzip my-project.zip

Open the project on your IDE and add a controller class

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
public class HelloController {

    @GetMapping("/hello")
    public String hello() {
        return "Hello World!";
    }
}

Compile and Run the application

./mvnw clean package

./mvnw spring-boot:run

Open the browser at http://localhost:8080/hello and you should see a message as below

Wow! You have got you spring boot app running in local

Now let’s see how to deploy your service to AWS Beanstalk, so that you can get to see you app on the internet. Isn’t that cool?

You have two ways to deploy the application to AWS Beanstalk. 1) via AWS console 2) via command line using AWS Beanstalk CLI.

We are programmers and we like command line, so we will go with option 2) via CLI :)

Download and install the CLI from https://github.com/aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli-setup

Once you have CLI installed, first step is to initialise the project with Elastic Beanstalk. Run eb init under the root folder of your application and select appropriate details as shown below.

eb init
Select a default region
1) us-east-1 : US East (N. Virginia)
2) us-west-1 : US West (N. California)
3) us-west-2 : US West (Oregon)
4) eu-west-1 : EU (Ireland)
5) eu-central-1 : EU (Frankfurt)
6) ap-south-1 : Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
7) ap-southeast-1 : Asia Pacific (Singapore)
8) ap-southeast-2 : Asia Pacific (Sydney)
9) ap-northeast-1 : Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
10) ap-northeast-2 : Asia Pacific (Seoul)
11) sa-east-1 : South America (Sao Paulo)
12) cn-north-1 : China (Beijing)
13) cn-northwest-1 : China (Ningxia)
14) us-east-2 : US East (Ohio)
15) ca-central-1 : Canada (Central)
16) eu-west-2 : EU (London)
17) eu-west-3 : EU (Paris)
18) eu-north-1 : EU (Stockholm)
19) eu-south-1 : EU (Milano)
20) ap-east-1 : Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
21) me-south-1 : Middle East (Bahrain)
22) af-south-1 : Africa (Cape Town)
(default is 3): 3
Select an application to use
1) [ Create new Application ]
(default is 1): 1
Enter Application Name
(default is "my-project"):
Application my-project has been created.
Select a platform.
1) .NET Core on Linux
2) .NET on Windows Server
3) Docker
4) GlassFish
5) Go
6) Java
7) Node.js
8) PHP
9) Packer
10) Python
11) Ruby
12) Tomcat
(make a selection): 6
Select a platform branch.
1) Corretto 11 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2
2) Corretto 8 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2
3) Java 8 running on 64bit Amazon Linux
4) Java 7 running on 64bit Amazon Linux
(default is 1): 1
Cannot setup CodeCommit because there is no Source Control setup, continuing with initialization
Do you want to set up SSH for your instances?
(Y/n): n

You might be asked for the Access Key Id and Secret Access Key in the above step. If you don’t have it handy, you can create them by login to AWS console and going to My Account -> My Security Credentials. Click on “Create New AccessKey”

Beanstalk Initialisation creates .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml file.

Modify the file to add deployment details (last two lines in the file)

branch-defaults:
  default:
    environment: null
    group_suffix: null
global:
  application_name: my-project
  branch: null
  default_ec2_keyname: null
  default_platform: Corretto 11 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2
  default_region: us-west-2
  include_git_submodules: true
  instance_profile: null
  platform_name: null
  platform_version: null
  profile: eb-cli
  repository: null
  sc: null
  workspace_type: Application
deploy:
  artifact: target/demo-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Finally we are going to create our environment by running the below command.

(IMPORTANT: Always run with -s as show below, otherwise a load balancer will be created for your application which comes with extra cost.)

eb create -s

Enter Environment Name
(default is my-project-dev):
Enter DNS CNAME prefix
(default is my-project-dev):
Would you like to enable Spot Fleet requests for this environment? (y/N): n
Uploading: [##################################################] 100% Done...
Environment details for: my-project-dev
Application name: my-project
Region: us-west-2
-------------------------
2020-11-02 12:01:11    INFO    Waiting for EC2 instances to launch. This may take a few minutes.
2020-11-02 12:01:15    INFO    Instance deployment successfully detected a JAR file in your source bundle.
2020-11-02 12:01:16    INFO    Instance deployment successfully generated a 'Procfile'.
2020-11-02 12:01:18    INFO    Instance deployment completed successfully.

Spring boot by default starts on port 8080 while Beanstalk uses port 5000. so you need to override the spring boot port with environment variable SERVER_PORT as follows

eb setenv SERVER_PORT=5000

Once done check the status of your app

eb status

Environment details for: my-project-dev
Application name: my-project
Region: 
Deployed Version: app-201103_073438
Environment ID: 
Platform: arn:aws:elasticbeanstalk:us-west-2::platform/Corretto 11 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2/3.1.2
Tier: WebServer-Standard-1.0
CNAME: my-project-dev.{region}.elasticbeanstalk.com
Updated: 2020-11-03 02:05:17.249000+00:00
Status: Ready
Health: Green

Use the CNAME to access your app. Open the browser at http://CNAME/hello and you should see your app online. Time to celebrate !!

You can login to AWS console and go to Elastic Beanstalk service and you should see the same environment created there.

Thank you for reading through.