Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your Node.js Elastic Beanstalk environment

This topic provides instructions to create an Amazon RDS using the Elastic Beanstalk console. You can use an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instance to store data gathered and modified by your application. The database can be coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk, or it can be created as decoupled and managed externally by another service. In these instructions the database is coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk. For more information about integrating an Amazon RDS with Elastic Beanstalk, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Adding a DB instance to your environment

To add a DB instance to your environment

1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console, and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Environments, and then choose the name of your environment from the list.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.

4. In the Database configuration category, choose Edit.

5. Choose a DB engine, and enter a user name and password.

6. To save the changes choose Apply at the bottom of the page.

Adding a DB instance takes about 10 minutes. When the environment update is complete, the DB instance's hostname and other connection information are available to your application through the following environment properties:

Property name	Description	Property value
RDS_HOSTNAME	The hostname of the DB instance.	On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Endpoint.
RDS_PORT	The port where the DB instance accepts connections. The default value varies among DB engines.	On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Port.
RDS_DB_NAME	The database name, ebdb.	On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: DB Name.
RDS_USERNAME	The username that you configured for your database.	On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: Master username.
RDS_PASSWORD	The password that you configured for your database.	Not available for reference in the Amazon RDS console.

For more information about configuring a database instance coupled with an Elastic Beanstalk environment, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Downloading a driver

Add the database driver to your project's package.json file under dependencies.

Example package.json – Express with MySQL

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "ejs": "latest",
    "aws-sdk": "latest",
    "express": "latest",
    "body-parser": "latest",
    "mysql": "latest"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app.js"
  }
}

Common driver packages for Node.js

• MySQL – mysql

• PostgreSQL – node-postgres

• SQL Server – node-mssql

• Oracle – node-oracledb

Connecting to a database

Elastic Beanstalk provides connection information for attached DB instances in environment properties. Use process.env.VARIABLE to read the properties and configure a database connection.

Example app.js – MySQL database connection

var mysql = require('mysql');

var connection = mysql.createConnection({
  host     : process.env.RDS_HOSTNAME,
  user     : process.env.RDS_USERNAME,
  password : process.env.RDS_PASSWORD,
  port     : process.env.RDS_PORT
});

connection.connect(function(err) {
  if (err) {
    console.error('Database connection failed: ' + err.stack);
    return;
  }

  console.log('Connected to database.');
});

connection.end();

For more information about constructing a connection string using node-mysql, see npmjs.org/package/mysql.