Deploy a Spring Boot Application to AWS Beanstalk

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll show how to deploy an application from our Bootstrap a Simple Application using Spring Boot tutorial to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

As part of this we’ll:

• Install and configure AWS CLI tools
• Create a Beanstalk project and MySQL deployment
• Configure the application for MySQL in AWS RDS
• Deploy, test, and scale the application

2. AWS Elastic Beanstalk Configuration

As a pre-requisite, we should have registered ourselves on AWS and created a Java 8 environment on Elastic Beanstalk. We also need to install the AWS CLI which will allow us to connect to our environment.

So, given that, we need to log in and initialize our application:

cd .../spring-boot-bootstrap
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)
(default is 3):

As shown above, we are prompted to select a region.

Finally, we can select the application:

>
Select an application to use
1) baeldung-demo
2) [ Create new Application ]
(default is 2): 

At this time, the CLI will create a file named .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml. This file will retain the defaults for the project.

3. Database

Now, we can create the database on the AWS Web Console or with the CLI using:

eb create --single --database

We’ll need to follow the instructions to provide a username and password.

With our database created, let’s configure now the RDS credentials for our application. We’ll do so in a Spring profile named beanstalk by creating src/main/resources/application-beanstalk.properties in our application:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://${rds.hostname}:${rds.port}/${rds.db.name}
spring.datasource.username=${rds.username}
spring.datasource.password=${rds.password}

Spring will search for the property named rds.hostname as an environmental variable called RDS_HOSTNAME. The same logic will apply to the rest.

4. Application

Now, we’ll add a Beanstalk–specific Maven profile to pom.xml:

<profile>
    <id>beanstalk</id>
    <build>
        <finalName>${project.name}-eb</finalName>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <excludes>
                        <exclude>**/cloud/config/*.java</exclude>
                    </excludes>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</profile>

Next, we’ll specify the artifact into the Elastic Beanstalk configuration file .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml:

deploy:
  artifact: target/spring-boot-bootstrap-eb.jar

And finally, we’ll include two environmental variables into Elastic Beanstalk. The first one will specify the active Spring profiles, and the second one will ensure the use of the default port 5000 expected by Beanstalk:

eb setenv SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=beanstalk,mysql
eb setenv SERVER_PORT=5000

5. Deployment and Testing

Now we are ready to build and deploy:

mvn clean package spring-boot:repackage
eb deploy

Next, we’ll check the status and determine the DNS name of the deployed application:

eb status

And our output should be something like:

Environment details for: BaeldungDemo-env
  Application name: baeldung-demo
  Region: us-east-2
  Deployed Version: app-181216_154233
  Environment ID: e-42mypzuc2x
  Platform: arn:aws:elasticbeanstalk:us-east-2::platform/Java 8 running on 64bit Amazon Linux/2.7.7
  Tier: WebServer-Standard-1.0
  CNAME: BaeldungDemo-env.uv3tr7qfy9.us-east-2.elasticbeanstalk.com
  Updated: 2018-12-16 13:43:22.294000+00:00
  Status: Ready
  Health: Green

We can now test the application – notice the use of the CNAME field as DNS to complete the URL.

Let’s add a book to our library now:

http POST http://baeldungdemo-env.uv3tr7qfy9.us-east-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/api/books title="The Player of Games" author="Iain M. Banks"

And, if all is well, we should get something like:

HTTP/1.1 201 
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:36:31 GMT
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Server: nginx/1.12.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: DENY
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

{
    "author": "Iain M. Banks",
    "id": 5,
    "title": "The Player of Games"
}

6. Scaling the Application

Lastly, we scale the deployment to run two instances:

eb scale 2

Beanstalk will now run 2 instances of the application and load balance traffic across both instances.

Automatic scaling for production is a bit more involved, so we’ll leave that for another day.

7. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we:

• Installed and configured the AWS Beanstalk CLI and configured an online environment
• Deployed a MySQL service and configured the database connection properties
• Built and deployed our configured Spring Boot application, and
• Tested and scaled the application

For more details, check out the Beanstalk Java documentation.