Django website on AWS – Elastic Beanstalk – Using Windows 7

This article is a work in progress…

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) website has instructions for doing this, but they are mostly tailored to doing it on a Linux machine. Here’s how to do it on Windows 7.

Prerequisites

• Download and unzip the Elastic Beanstalk command line tools package (eb)
TIP: Unzip it into a directory so that there are no spaces in the full filepath. Spaces + command line = not fun.

Add eb to the path

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Users\andygilbertson\AWS-ElasticBeanstalk-CLI-2.6.0\eb\windows\

pip install http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.7.2.tar.gz

Steps

Open up a command prompt (cmd.exe, not PowerShell)

Create a virtual environment

cd C:\
virtualenv --python=C:\Python27\python.exe Users\andygilbertson\envs\django_aws_hello

This will create a mini Python installation in the directory. You can go there and see the files to confirm.

Go into the newly created “Scripts” directory

cd C:\Users\andygilbertson\envs\django_aws_hello\Scripts

Then activate the virtual environment

activate

Now you’ll see your virtual environment name in parentheses to indicate you are in your virtual environment
Inside your virtual env, install django and python

pip install django==1.6.2

easy_install MySQL-python==1.2.5

Start the Django project locally

cd..
django-admin.py startproject hellodjango

Go into the newly created root folder for your local Django site

cd hellodjango

Create the requirements.txt file

pip freeze > requirements.txt

After freezing, requirements.txt should look like this:

Django==1.6.2
mysql-python==1.2.5

Initialize the Git repository

git init .

Make sure you’re in the project directory

cd C:\Users\andygilbertson\envs\django_aws_hello\hellodjango

Run eb init

eb init

Now you’ll have to fill in a bunch of Elastic Beanstalk settings.

Settings to choose

• Environment Tier: WebServer::Standard::1.0
• Solution stack: 32bit Amazon Linux 2013.09 running Python 2.7
• Environment type: LoadBalanced
• Create an RDS DB instance: y

On your local computer, create an .ebextensions directory in the top-level directory of your source bundle. In this example, we use /root/mysite/.ebextensions.

mkdir .ebextensions

Create a configuration file (myapp.config)

container_commands:
  01_syncdb:    
    command: "django-admin.py syncdb --noinput"
    leader_only: true

option_settings:
  - namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:python
    option_name: WSGIPath
    value: mysite/wsgi.py
  - option_name: DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
    value: mysite.settings
  - option_name: AWS_SECRET_KEY
    value: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
  - option_name: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
    value: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

Save this .config file in the newly created .ebextensions directory

Edit your settings.py file (/root/mysite/settings.py). Add this for the DATABASES object:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': os.environ['RDS_DB_NAME'],
        'USER': os.environ['RDS_USERNAME'],
        'PASSWORD': os.environ['RDS_PASSWORD'],
        'HOST': os.environ['RDS_HOSTNAME'],
        'PORT': os.environ['RDS_PORT'],
    }
}

Add these files to the Git repository and commit the changes

git add .
git commit -m "eb configuration"
git aws.push

New you can run eb start to actually initialize Elastic Beanstalk with all the settings

eb start

When it’s all up and running (it takes about 15 minutes) you should be able to get some status info

eb status --verbose

When the server status is Green, you should be able to grab the supplied URL and plug it into your browser. If everything went according to plan, you’ll see Django’s basic welcome page.

If you see the Elastic Beanstalk starter page (not Django’s), you may have to run Git aws.push again.

git aws.push

Troubleshooting

One of the first places to look is the AWS Console. Go to Elastic Beanstalk, find your environment. On the left you’ll see “Logs”. “Snapshot Logs” and read through them to find errors.

Closing Up Shop

To stop the Elastic Beanstalk server/environment

eb stop

To delete the Elastic Beanstalk server/environment

eb delete

To deactivate your virtual environment

cd C:\Users\andygilbertson\envs\django_aws_hello\Scripts
deactivate