Custom AWS Elastic Beanstalk Platform: Ubuntu 16.04, Apache2, and PHP 7.0

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In this whitepaper, we explore the process of creating a custom AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform for Ubuntu 16.04, Apache2, and PHP 7.0. This configuration is particularly beneficial for PHP websites requiring CURL to be compiled with OpenSSL, as Amazon Linux comes with an NSS compiled CURL. 

What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

As the name suggests, this service, powered by Amazon Web Services, allows you to easily deploy web development apps. Through this tool, your app can be up and running in no time and without the underlying traditional infrastructure. In other words, AWS Beanstalk is supposed to help tech professionals by allowing them to focus on writing more code that enables features on the app without having to worry about making infrastructure changes to accommodate for each new feature.

Why Create An Elastic Custom Beanstalk Custom Platform?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk has a list on its site that shows support for multiple languages and development stacks. However, it also says that the service is designed to support more languages and stacks in the future.

Our custom solution provides all of the benefits of AWS Elastic Beanstalk with an added layer of customization from the operating system level.

The Challenge: Configuring an Apache2, PHP 7.0, and Ubuntu 16.04 custom platform for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

The Solution: We successfully created and deployed a custom AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform based on Ubuntu 16.04 and PHP. Custom EBS platforms enable us to modify the operating system, installed software, scripts, and other system configurations. The default AWS Elastic Beanstalk PHP platform includes Apache, PHP 7.0 or 7.1, but uses Amazon Linux as the operating system. In some cases, having an Ubuntu 16.04 environment on EBS is beneficial, so we configured a custom AWS EBS platform. You can find the custom platform’s scripts on our Github account here.

How to Use Our AWS Elastic Beanstalk Custom Platform

Be cautious when selecting the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for this custom platform, as it varies across regions. We used the ami-1b791862 AMI for this configuration and deployed it in the Ireland region.

This AWS Elastic Beanstalk custom platform on Ubuntu 16.04 PHP platform includes:

• Apache2;
• PHP 7.0;
• Various PHP modules (refer to the 02-install-php.sh script for more details).

Consider the following points when using this custom AWS Elastic Beanstalk Ubuntu 16.04 PHP platform:

• The PHP memory limit is set to default;
• Log rotation is enabled for Apache2;
• Apache2 EBS health checks do NOT work;
• Environment-level configuration is NOT functional yet – we will update the article when it’s operational.

We will continue to update and refine this custom EBS platform, releasing modifications via Github.

For even more versatiilty, we also created another AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform running Nginx, PHP 7.1, PHP-FPM, the Google PageSpeed plugin, and PHP-FPM caching on Amazon Linux.

To learn more about our software development services , please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help.