How do I perform Laravel Artisan migrations on AWS Elastic Beanstalk?

Question

I have a Laravel installation and have set up three environments with their own corresponding config directories:

• local
• staging
• production

I use php artisan migrate:make create_users_table etc as described here to create database migrations.

In my local environment I use Vagrant and a simple MySQL server setup, and on staging & production I use AWS RDS.

To configure database access for the staging environment I have a app/config/staging/database.php file with settings like this:

...
"mysql" => array(
    "driver" => "mysql",
    "host" => $_SERVER["RDS_HOSTNAME"],
    "database" => $_SERVER["RDS_DB_NAME"],
    "username" => $_SERVER["RDS_USERNAME"],
    "password" => $_SERVER["RDS_PASSWORD"],
    "charset" => "utf8",
    "collaction" => "utf8_unicode_ci",
    "prefix" => "",
),
...

I use git to deploy the app with git aws.push as described here.

The question is: How do I run the migration on my staging (and later production) EBS server when deploying?

Answer 1

I solved it by creating a new directory in the root of my project named .ebextensions. In that directory I created a script file my-scripts.config:

.ebextensions/
    my-scripts.config
app/
artisan
bootstrap
...

The file my-scripts.config gets executed when EBS deploys, is a YAML file and looks like this:

container_commands:
    01-migration:
        command: "php /var/app/ondeck/artisan --env=staging migrate"
        leader_only: true

Add the directory and file to git, commit, and run git aws.push and it will migrate.

Explanations on how stuff in .ebextensions works can be found here.

The path /var/app/ondeck is where your application lives when your script runs, it will afterwards be copied into /var/app/current.

The artisan option --env=staging is useful for telling artisan what environment it should run in, so that it can find the correct database settings from app/config/staging/database.php

If you need a quick and dirty way to log why the migrate command fails you might want to try out something like "php /var/app/ondeck/artisan --env=staging migrate > /tmp/artisan-migrate.log" so that you can log into your ec2 instance and check the log.

Answer 2

After oskarth answer, some instructions might had been changed in the past few years on how AWS Elastic Beanstalk deploys a new application version. According to the AWS documentation related to the container_commands of .ebextensions, case the "cwd" option is not set, the working directory is the staging directory of the unzipped application. It means that the user under the instance during the deployment process will be positioned at /var/app/staging/, where the extracted source version of the application is. Therefore, the artisan command can be executed either alone or following by var/app/staging/ path instead of /var/app/ondeck/ like this:

container_commands:
01-migration:
    command: "php artisan --env=staging migrate"
    leader_only: true

or this

container_commands:
01-migration:
    command: "php /var/app/staging/artisan --env=staging migrate"
    leader_only: true

I have deploy my project using the both configurations above. I discovered that after hours looking at the eb-engine.log file and reading the documentation over and over again. I hope anyone take so long as well after reading that. The logs can be accessed throw the eb logs command on terminal, on the environment console or through the S3 bucket associated to the environment. There is pretty much everything in the documentation explained. I didn't comment it on the oskarth answer I'm not allowed yet!

ps. the /var/app/staging path has no relation with the staging environment in laravel.

Answer 3

Worth mentioning here if people are using a dockerised container to run their application on Beanstalk, you will have to run this inside the container.

files:
    "/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/post/98_build_app.sh":
        mode: "000755"
        owner: root
        group: root
        content: |
            #!/usr/bin/env bash
            echo "Running laravel migrations" >> /var/log/eb-activity.log
            docker exec $(docker ps -qf name=php-fpm) sh -c "php artisan --env=staging migrate --force || echo Migrations didnt run" >> /var/log/eb-activity.log 2>&1

The problem is the container name changes each time.

So the docker ps -qf name=php-fpm part is just going to get a container with the container name containing php-fpm. So replace that with something else that matches which container you want to run it on.

Also use --force because otherwise, its going to try and wait for a prompt