eb-disable-npm

eb-disable-npm

This package is the successor to https://github.com/mixmaxhq/eb-fix-npm/. Even with that package's optimizations, we at Mixmax still found npm to be too slow and memory intensive on Elastic Beanstalk, actually forcing us to use more expensive EC2 instance types than our application would otherwise require.

So, we use this package's .ebextensions to prevent Elastic Beanstalk from installing/rebuilding modules altogether. Instead, we deploy our Node modules along with our application source from our CI server. What makes this possible is that the CI server already installs the modules for the purposes of running our tests, and uses the same CPU architecture as Elastic Beanstalk's EC2 instances.

This package has been tested against Elastic Beanstalk platform versions 3.1.0 and 2.1.3.

Installation

1. npm install eb-disable-npm --save-dev (see here for why --save-dev)
2. Commit the .ebextensions file it creates.

Usage

npm install and deploy on a machine with the same architecture as your EC2 instances. If you use the EB CLI to deploy, either commit your Node modules or do

git add node_modules/ --force
eb deploy --staged

Warning

You will not be able to change an Elastic Beanstalk's Node version in place, since the EC2 instances won't rebuild their modules after the configuration changes. Instead, you will have to clone the environment, change the version (at which point the environment will become unhealthy), deploy modules built for that version to that environment (healing the environment) and then swap the environment URLs.

Modifying the .ebextensions file

This package will overwrite the file if/when it is updated.

Pull requests are welcome if you have some generally-useful modifications to suggest.

If you'd like to make modifications specific to your use case, you should uninstall this package after installing the .ebextensions file. Uninstallation won't take the file with it.

Release History

• 1.0.0 Initial commit