How to manually upload static content with elastic beanstalk and s3

Question

I have a Python/Flask application that I've deployed in elastic beanstalk. I have been deploying updates via git aws.push, which includes my static js libraries, css, and images.

I now have about 1 GB of static content in the form of images. I want to serve that content from the same location as my application, that is, from the same place I was serving them before, in a /static/img/ folder. However, I obviously don't want to add the images to source control or deploy them with the git macro.

Ideally, I would like to connect to the instance where the files are hosted and upload them manually. However, I do not know how to do this. I have searched through the s3 associated with the elastic beanstalk app, but there is no sign of my app there, only a repository of zipped deployments.

I could create a new bucket and handle things that way, but I haven't been able to map a domain to a new bucket. Whenever I try to add a CNAME record to the bucket, it is rejected because "URL/IP cannot be added as a CNAME." In any case, the process that seems most intuitive is to manually put unversioned static content in place next to versioned, deployed code.

Answer 1

You're correct, this type of static content should not be part of your repository and certainly not stored on EC2 instance's volumes.

AWS' best practice for this use case would be to use S3 and directly link to S3 objects from your HTML code. S3 is a natively HTTP enabled object storage service.

In order to use S3 as web server, you must create a bucket on S3.

You can either use the S3 provided URL <bucket-name>.s3-website-<AWS-region>.amazonaws.com to link to your content from your web pages.

Or you can use your own domain name. In this case, your bucket name must be named after your domain name and you must enable "Website Hosting" option at the bucket level. This is required to let S3 know how to map HTTP requests to buckets.

A high level scenario is described here : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website-hosting-intro.html And more details are provided by S3 documentation.

As an added benefit, storage in S3 costs less money than EBS storage.