How to get the output of container_commands after deployment?

Question

My Elastic Beanstalk container uses container_commands to run a script to patch the database on every deployment.

I run the deployments with a home-brewed script that calls the UpdateEnvironment on the Elastic Beanstalk API.

The problem is, I have no visibility on the output of my container_commands, which is pretty scary during deployment. The only way I can tell if something went wrong is when a command returns a non-zero value: in that case DescribeEvents will report a problem. But still, I have no way to get the actual output of the command.

How can I get my container_commands output after the deployment has finished?

Ideally, with the Elastic Beanstalk API, but any other programmatic way will be fine!

You may look into this following link. http://junkheap.net/blog/2013/05/20/elastic-beanstalk-post-deployment-scripts/ — Balaji Vinnakota, Dec 09 '16 at 08:52

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '14 at 22:15

Not a console view, but it is (now) visible in the logs.

.ebextensions/10-log.config

container_commands:
  05-whoami:
    command: "whoami"

/var/log/cfn-init.log after deployment

2014-07-01 22:08:10,695 [DEBUG] Running command 05-whoami
2014-07-01 22:08:10,695 [DEBUG] Generating defaults for command 05-whoami
2014-07-01 22:08:11,014 [DEBUG] Defaults script for 05-whoami output: {"env":{"EB_REQUEST_ID":"110d0932-016c-11e4-9f71-3fe967c5cd60", [long list of params omitted for brevity]}
2014-07-01 22:08:11,015 [DEBUG] No test for command 05-whoami
2014-07-01 22:08:11,050 [INFO] Command 05-whoami succeeded
2014-07-01 22:08:11,050 [DEBUG] Command 05-whoami output: root

found mine in `/var/log/cfn-init-cmd.log` – otaku Jan 21 '21 at 16:12 — otaku, Jan 21 '21 at 16:12

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 26 '13 at 08:47

Reply from the AWS support:

The easiest way to see the output would be to pipe the command or script output to a file using >>. Unfortunately there isn't a live console that can be viewed to show the process live.

So unfortunately there is no way to do that (yet).

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 10 '23 at 21:31

Like @otaku mentioned above in one of the comments, I also located my command output in /var/log/cfn-init-cmd.log.

Here's what I was trying to run:

container_commands:
  20-migrate_database:
    command: |
      bash ./bin/export_database_migrations_url.sh
      bash ./bin/run_migrations.sh
    leader_only: true

The originally accepted answers are now a bit dated (as of May 2023). I'm sure they were right at the time, but this might be where to look if you're reading this nowadays.

How to get the output of container_commands after deployment?

3 Answers3