Elastic Beanstalk custom linux packages

Question

How do you define the custom packages needed for the linux instances for elastic beanstalk? Is there way to install them once, and create an image of that to duplicate for other instances to be spun up?

here is the nodejs packages i am using as well.

{"dependencies": {
"sails": "0.9.9",
"grunt": "0.4.1",
"sails-disk": "~0.9.0",
"ejs": "0.8.4",
"optimist": "0.3.4",
"jsdom": "0.8.6",
"request": "*",
"validator": "~3.1.0",
"bcrypt": "0.7.7",
"q": "*",
"node-uuid": "*",
"async": "~0.2.10",
"nodemailer": "~0.6.0",
"aws-sdk": "~2.0.0-rc10",
"imagemagick-native": "~0.2.9",
"orchestrate": "0.0.8",
"newrelic": "~1.3.2"
}}

Answer 1

config file is what you need. I figured it out.

You need to have a .ebextensions/ in the top level of your app. Then place a myapp.config in the ebtextensions directory.

here is what i have that installs the packages

packages:
  yum:
    ImageMagick : ""
    bison       : ""                    
    byacc : ""
    cscope: ""
    ctags: ""
    cvs: ""
    diffstat: ""
    doxygen: ""
    flex: ""
    gcc: ""
    gcc-c++: ""
    gcc-gfortran: ""
    gettext: ""
    git: ""
    indent: ""
    intltool: ""
    libtool: ""
    patch: ""
    patchutils: ""
    rcs: ""
    rpm-build: ""
    subversion: ""
    swig: ""
    systemtap: ""
    openssl-devel: ""
    ImageMagick-c++: "" 
    ImageMagick-c++-devel: ""
    crash: ""
    kexec-tools: ""
    latrace: ""
    ltrace: ""
    strace: ""
    system-rpm-config: ""
    texinfo: ""
    valgrind: ""
    busybox: ""