“npm install” on Elastic Beanstalk fails unless manually executed

Question

I\'ve got an Elastic Beanstalk environment with a PHP application. I\'d like to just run npm install after my application has been deployed.

node

Answer 1

For anyone else experiencing this issue on a PHP Elastic Beanstalk instance, here's what helped me get through this:

1) If you're running on an Amazon Linux instance, doing a yum install nodejs will give you a super old version that will most likely be incompatible with a number of things. I had to add a script to my .ebextensions dir and execute it from one of my configs to install an updated version of nodejs. Here is a copy of that script:

#!/bin/bash

hash_file="/tmp/nodejshash"

check_if_npm_packages_has_to_be_installed () {
    if [ -f $hash_file ]; then
        check_if_same_hash
    else
        return 0
    fi
}

check_if_same_hash () {
    hash_new="$(md5sum .ebextensions/bin/install-nodejs.sh 2> /dev/null | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"
    hash_current="$(cat "$hash_file" 2> /dev/null | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"

    if [ $hash_new == $hash_current ]; then
        return 1
    else
        return 0
    fi
}

install_node () {
    if hash nodejs 2> /dev/null; then
        echo 'nodejs install, add more processing if needed' > /dev/null
    else
        curl -sL https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | bash -
        yum install -y nodejs
    fi
}

install_npm_packages () {
    npm install -g bower
    npm install -g gulp
}

update_current_hash () {
    echo $hash_new > $hash_file
}

install_node

if check_if_npm_packages_has_to_be_installed; then
    install_npm_packages
    update_current_hash
fi

2) If you're on a micro instance by default, the node-sass package was taking a very long time to build and eventually timed out. I increased my instance size to a t2.small to get past this.

Hope this helps someone else out.