How to configure Elastic Beanstalk for using Rails with Postgres?

Question

Elastic Beanstalk has built in support for RDS. But, I want to use Postgresql with Elastic Beanstalk. Which will be the best approach for doing this?

Answer 1

The easiest and cleanest way I found, assuming you're using Elastic Beanstalk CLI eb:

1. Create an instance (follow the steps):

   eb init
   

   This will create an instance with MySQL.

2. Once it's created, stop it.

   eb stop
   

   This will stop your instance and delete the MySQL database that was created by the initial setup.

3. Edit your instance configuration file in .elasticbeanstalk directory at the root of your project, replace DBEngine entry in the [aws:rds:dbinstance] section by postgres.

   vi .elasticbeanstalk/optionsettings.<my-app>-env
   
   [aws:rds:dbinstance]
   DBDeletionPolicy=Delete
   DBEngine=postgres
   DBInstanceClass=db.t1.micro
   DBSnapshotIdentifier=
   DBUser=<dbrootuser>
   

4. Restart the instance:

   eb start
   
   Starting application ".<my-app>".
   Waiting for environment "<my-app>-env" to launch.
   2014-07-17 17:53:15 INFO    createEnvironment is starting.
   2014-07-17 17:53:21 INFO    Using elasticbeanstalk-us-east-1-xxxxxxx as Amazon S3 storage bucket for environment data.
   2014-07-17 17:53:52 INFO    Created EIP: nn.nnn.nnn.nnn
   2014-07-17 17:53:58 INFO    Created security group named: awseb-e-xxx
   2014-07-17 17:54:10 INFO    Creating RDS database named: <db name>. This may take a few minutes.
   2014-07-17 18:06:09 INFO    Created RDS database named: <db name>
   2014-07-17 18:07:07 INFO    Waiting for EC2 instances to launch. This may take a few minutes.
   

5. Check the status. Once it gets green, you'll now have a postgres database.

   eb status --verbose
   
   URL         : <my-app>-env-xxxxx.elasticbeanstalk.com
   Status      : Ready
   Health      : Green
   
   RDS Database: YYYYDatabase | <db name>.zzzzzz.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:5432
   Database Engine:    postgres 9.3.3
   Allocated Storage:  10
   Instance Class:     db.t1.micro
   Multi AZ:           False
   Master Username:    <dbrootuser>
   Creation Time:      2014-07-17 18:02:28
   DB Instance Status: available
   

Answer 2

You can set your custom postgres database running anywhere and make your rails application to use it from your database.yml file settings.

For e.g.

You can get a hosted postgres instance on Heroku Postgres - it gives very nicely formatted configuration details for ActiveRecord. You just have to get them in your database.yml file.