Django App Prerequisites for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Create a virtual Python environment for the Django project

Install virtualenv if needed:

$ which virtualenv
$ pip install virtualenv

Create the virtual Python Environment

$ virtualenv -p python3.4 /path/to/project_venv

Where /path/to/project_env is a path unique to the project.

Start the virtual environment:

$ . /path/to/project_venv/bin/activate

Confirm the Python version:

$ python --version

Leave the virtual environment:

$ deactivate

Create a Django application locally

• Install all prerequisites necessary for the Django app, e.g. Python, pip, Django, etc.
• See Working With Django Projects, The Basics
• Run and test the Django application locally, e.g. with python manage.py runserver.

Install Django

(Make sure to use the virtual Python 3 environment.)

$ pip install django

Confirm the installation with

$ pip freeze | grep -i django
Django==1.9.2

Install the Django project and its dependencies.

Install AWS Elastic Beanstalk CLI

It's necessary to give the EC2 IAM role permission to assign AWS Elastic Beanstalk roles.

N.B. It would probably be better to have a dedicated IAM user account to perform these actions, and assign this policy to a group that the user account would then be included in.

AWS IAM Management Console > Roles > nrosedevs_ec2_iam_role > Permissions tab > Attach Policiy button > select AWSElasticBeanstalkFullAccess

Install the AWS Elastic Beanstalk cli:

N.B. See [Troubleshooting_Deploying_a_Django_Application_With_Elastic_Beanstalk#Errors_installing_awsebcli_on_Mac_OS_for_Python_2.7|the Troubleshooting article] for issues installing awsebcli on Mac OS X.

$ pip install awsebcli

Confirm the installation with eb --version

Create an Elastic Beanstalk application in the project directory:

$ eb init

This command will prompt for properties of the application, e.g. application name, keyname pair, python version, region, etc.

Create an Elastic Beanstalk environment. This will prompt for the name of the environment and a domain name prefix for the environment.

$ eb create

This command--even when run locally--will launch a new Elastic Beanstalk environment, and with it a new EC2 instance to support it.

The new EB environment and EC2 instance can be seen in the AWS Management Console.

This command and eb deploy take the local files (and a snapshot of the database?) and upload them to the corresponding EB environment.

I was unaware of this point for the first two days of working my way through the documentation. Maybe it's because I jumped into the topic of deploying a Django app that I missed it, but it wasn't really stated plainly the abstract concept of working locally and pushing a working version of the app to the EC2 instance.

Install Git and PostgreSQL

$ sudo yum install git-all

Notes

See also

• Common Steps for Deploying Python Applications - AWS Elastic Beanstalk documentation
• Installing Python - AWS Elastic Beanstalk documentation
• Deploying a Django app on AWS