How do you call db:seed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk apps?

Question

I know that you can run tasks as part of each deploy, but I only want to bootstrap the database once.

Answer 1

Kristian's answer is close, but you should also add:

container_commands:
  seeddb:
    command: 'export HOME=/root; rake db:seed'
    leader_only: true

So that the DB is only seeded from 1 EC2 instance, rather than all of them at the same time. Depending on your EB deployment/version, the export HOME may or may not be needed.