Troubleshooting Deploying a Django Application With Elastic Beanstalk

Overview

An ongoing list of issues, with solutions as they are found, that I have encountered while deploying a Django web application using Elastic Beanstalk.

"No environment found" error with aws eb cli

Use case

Almost all eb commands result in an error the effect of No Environment found for EnvironmentName = 'name-ev'.

Cause

An EB environment was created, but then not deleted entirely.

Fix

Delete the environment through the AWS console, and then delete the .elasticbeanstalk/ and .ebextensions/ directories.

Zip file errors while installing a custom Django module

Use case

pip install path/to/my-custom-package.0.1.zip results in error: BadZipFile: File is not a zip file.

Cause

This happened after using wget to retrieve a .zip archive off GitHub.

Despite the .zip extension, the file type can register as HTML on Linux.

Fix

Test the file type:

$ file myzipfile.zip
myzipfile.zip: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode txt, with very long lines

Upload the zip file to the server using scp:

`scp -i path/to/namekey_pair.pem path/to/source.zip ec2-user@public_dns.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:path/to/dest.zip`

(Where namekey_pair.pem is the actual name of a .pem file, and public_dns is the actual address of the public dns from the EC2 console.)