Vincent Durmont

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August 14, 2015

ebenv — Manipulate your AWS ElasticBeanstalk environment variables

Recently, I used AWS ElasticBeanstalk a lot to deploy a few applications and it is always a pain to configure all the environment variables I need to run my applications.

To solve this problem, I published a small application that enables you to manipulate your environment directly from your configuration files: ebenv.

On one of my most recent projects, here is the type of configuration file I use:

myproject.aws.access_key=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
myproject.aws.secret_key=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

myproject.db.password=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
myproject.db.show_sql=false
myproject.db.type=MYSQL
myproject.db.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myproject
myproject.db.username=root

myproject.files.bucket=/tmp/myprojectfiles
myproject.files.type=LOCAL

myproject.github.client_id=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
myproject.github.client_secret=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

myproject.mandrill.enabled=true
myproject.mandrill.api_key=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

myproject.url.api=http://localhost:9997
myproject.url.static=http://localhost:9998
myproject.url.website=http://localhost:9999

# 30 minutes
myproject.worker.user.delay=1800000

Everytime I set up a new environment I have to use the web interface to add the variables one by one. That's a lot of copy/paste. Probably a job for a robot ;)

The ElasticBeanstalk client enables us to define the environment variables with a command:

eb setenv keyA=valA keyB=valB keyC=valC

It is still too long to write this command line and that is why I created ebenv.

Installation

Simple one-liner ;)

npm install -g ebenv

Export AWS config to a file

ebenv export myfile.json
ebenv export myfile.yml
ebenv export myfile.properties
ebenv export --format=json myfile

Write a file to the AWS config

ebenv import myfile.json
ebenv import myfile.yml
ebenv import myfile.properties
ebenv import --format=json myfile

Try it out!

Github repo: vdurmont/ebenv