AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Error occurred during build: Command 01_syncdb

Question 1

Instead of using django-admin.py I use manage.py since, as reported in the django doc:

In addition, manage.py is automatically created in each Django project. manage.py is a thin wrapper around django-admin.py that takes care of two things for you before delegating to django-admin.py:

It puts your project’s package on sys.path. It sets the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable so that it points to your project’s settings.py file. It calls django.setup() to initialize various internals of Django.

So my working config is:

container_commands:
  01_syncdb:
    command: "python manage.py syncdb --noinput"
    leader_only: true
...

ps: don't pass your aws credential in the config file! Use instead environment variables ;)

Question 2

I feel your pain.

I found that using eb logs from the deployment command line gave me back the necessary stack traces to resolve this issue every time. Search the logs that come back for 01_syncdb and you will find the necessary bits to find a resolution. For me it has happened many times and once the cause was letting my local_settings.py into the git repo. Then I found in eb logs that my application was trying to connect to the database at 127.0.0.1. I removed that file from git and redeployed and BLAMMO! the application was fixed.

You could do this to capture the logs locally: eb logs > eb_logs.txt.

Unfortunately, the response from the eb status command is very brief. Reading the full logs is the only way to really know what happened in there. The BRIGHT SIDE™ is that with eb logs you don't need to connect to the instance.

Question 3

I had problems with setting environment variables through the .config file. So what I did is to use only a minimal option_settings:

option_settings:
  - namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:python
    option_name: WSGIPath
    value: django_generic/wsgi.py

And then having the following line in the wsgi.py

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "django_generic.settings")

And setting all the Environment variables (such as the AWS access keys) in the settings of the EB Environment (Configuration --> Software Configuration --> Environment Properties). That's also where you can set the ALLOWED_HOSTS setting and your DB_NAME etc.

Sometimes the problem can also be related to using django-admin.py vs manage.py, see this question: Django on AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Unexpected syncdb error on deploy

Question 4

If you can not solve 01_syncdb failed problem by checking the config file (exactly the same with the tutorial), you should check other files that may cause this error.

For example, in my case, the application was build successfully for the first time, then it failed with "01_sycndb". After I double check the log file, I found this error was introduced by a typo in settings.py.

Check the log and you may find some candies.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/using-features.loggingS3.title.html

Question 5

This also happen when you deploy a new app and forget to create a RDS instance.