Deploying to Elastic Beanstalk via CircleCi 2.0

I got to here after spending hours trying to deploy to an Elastic Beanstalk instance via CircleCi 2.0 so I thought I'd write up what worked for me to hopefully help others. Shout out to RobertoSchneiders who's steps for getting it to work with CircleCi 1.0 were my starting point.

For the record, I'm not the most server-savvy of developers so there may be a better way of doing this.

Setup a user on AWS IAM to use for deployments

Add user here
Set a username and select Programmatic access as the Access type
Click 'Create group' on the user permissions page
Set a group name and search for the AdministratorAccess-AWSElasticBeanstalk and AmazonS3FullAccess policies and select them
- Note: This used to be just AWSElasticBeanstalkFullAccess, but that's since been deprecated
Create the group so it's assigned to your new user
Review and create the user

Setup an Elastic Beanstalk application

'Create New Application'
'Create New Environment'
'Create web server'
On the Environment Information page where it asks you to set the 'Environment name', set it to something with the Git branch name in e.g. BRANCHNAME-my-application
- I do this as I have a staging branch and the master branch so in our EB config, we'll be replacing BRANCHNAME with the $CIRCLE_BRANCH environment variable provided by CircleCi so when deploying the staging branch for example, it will know to deploy to the staging-my-application environment on Elastic Beanstalk
Follow the rest of the setup as you require

Add deployment user environment variables to CircleCi

Project Settings > Environment Variables
- AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
- AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Add `.elasticbeanstalk/config.yml` config to application code

Update the values in the below snippet to match what you setup.

branch-defaults:
  master:
    environment: $CIRCLE_BRANCH-my-application
global:
  application_name: My Application
  default_ec2_keyname: XXXXXX
  default_platform: 64bit Amazon Linux 2017.09 v2.6.2 running Ruby 2.4 (Passenger Standalone)
  default_region: eu-west-1
  sc: git

Note: Ensure the application_name is exactly what you called your application in Elastic Beanstalk when you did the 'Create New Application' step.

Also Note: Do not set a profile: value here, the profile will be set based on the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables you setup.

Update your `.circleci/config.yml`

The following is what I think is the bare minimum I needed to get only the master or staging branches on your Git repo to deploy.
Update $CIRCLE_BRANCH-my-application to the environment name you set in Elastic Beanstalk.

version: 2
jobs:
  deploy:
    working_directory: ~/app
    docker:
      - image: circleci/ruby:2.4.3
    steps:
      - checkout

      - run:
          name: Installing deployment dependencies
          working_directory: /
          command: |
            sudo apt-get -y -qq update
            sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev build-essential
            sudo pip3 install awsebcli

      - run:
          name: Deploying
          command: eb deploy $CIRCLE_BRANCH-my-application

workflows:
  version: 2
  build:
    jobs:
      - deploy:
          filters:
            branches:
              only:
                - staging
                - master

Cross fingers

Commit and let CircleCi do it's thing. If all goes well you should see it updating on the Elastic Beanstalk dashboard as the 'Deploying' step is running in CircleCi.

ryansimms/circleci-2.0-eb-deployment.md