We started noticing slower deployment times when we switched to GIT deployment on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. The core issue turned out to be how nodejs module dependencies are packaged. When git is used it is typical to ignore the node_modules directory and thus 'npm install' will install them server side during a deployment. The problem is that 'npm install' has a hard dependency on git so you must have all of the following installed on all instances for deployment to work correctly:
- git
- openssl
- expat
- gettext
- zlib
#Tests We tested the following 2 builds, one with node_modules bundled and one where it was installed server side via 'npm install'.