How does AWS Beanstalk use NPM when deploying a Nodejs App?

Question

I\'m curious about the overall workflow of an AWS Beanstalk deployment. I\'m assuming it runs npm at some point to get the packages installed on the server(s). But I was just wo

Answer 1

In the new versions of Elastic Beanstalk Node's stacks, the configuration has changed, as pointed by @etreworgy's comment.

You can check the current behavior, by running inside an EC2 instance:

cat /opt/elasticbeanstalk/containerfiles/ebnode.py | grep -A 5 PRODUCTION

It returns, as of today:

        if 'NPM_USE_PRODUCTION' not in npm_env:
            npm_env['NPM_USE_PRODUCTION'] = 'true'

        if npm_env['NPM_USE_PRODUCTION'] == 'true':
            print 'Running npm with --production flag'
            check_call([npm_path, '--production', 'install'], cwd=app_path, env=npm_env)
            check_call([npm_path, '--production', 'rebuild'], cwd=app_path, env=npm_env)
        else:
            print 'Running npm without --production flag'

So, currently, it uses the npm install --production by default.

For those ones that want to disable it (as I was when I went to this answer), you have to create a anything.config inside an .ebextensions folder at your project's root folder (where anything means really anything; node, npm, whatever you want), with the content:

option_settings:
    - namespace: aws:elasticbeanstalk:application:environment
      option_name: NPM_USE_PRODUCTION
      value: false