HostManager is a small Ruby app that runs on each EC2 node in an Elastic Beanstalk environment. It processes HTTP requests containing commands from the Elastic Beanstalk service. These commands include things like status checks, configuration updates, app deployments, etc.

The goal of this project is to extend Amazon's HostManger application to support additional application types with custom configurations that are not enabled through the stock app.

Why? Because ElasticBeanstalk is a nice service and I want to use it with other application stacks, many of which will never be supported by Amazon directly.

Stock HostManager basically just supports a webroot directory. This extended version supports completely custom configurations by giving YOU control over the deployment process. All you need to do is ship your application with a config directory filled with custom hooks for deployment and startup/shutdown of custom server processes.

Anything! Well, sort of. The default build is still designed to work with Apache running on port 80. This is required because we need to proxy the Elastic Beanstalk HTTP requests to the HostManager application, which is running on a higher port. It should be pretty easy to replace Apache with another webserver, like nginx, if that's desired.

A basic application should consist of the following:

• beanstalk
  • deploy.sh (copy files, fix permissions, etc.)
  • post-deploy.sh (optional)
  • config.sh (optional, updates custom config vars)
  • shutdown.sh (stop app servers)
  • startup.sh (start app servers)
• application source (anything!)

There's an example included that demonstrates deploying a simple PHP sample application - basically the same one that AWS uses. You can use this as a foundation for deploying other custom apps.

1. Launch an existing Beanstalk AMI in EC2 (NOT THROUGH BEANSTALK)
2. Zip up this directory
3. Use wget or scp to move it to your server
4. Unzip and enter directory
5. Add execute perms to deploy.sh and run
6. Use EC2 to roll a new AMI
7. Done!