QuickStart: Deploy a Node.js application to Elastic Beanstalk

This QuickStart tutorial walks you through the process of creating a Node.js application and deploying it to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Note

This QuickStart tutorial is intended for demonstration purposes. Do not use the application created in this tutorial for production traffic.

Your AWS account

If you're not already an AWS customer, you need to create an AWS account. Signing up enables you to access Elastic Beanstalk and other AWS services that you need.

If you already have an AWS account, you can move on to Prerequisites.

Create an AWS account

Sign up for an AWS account

If you do not have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one.

To sign up for an AWS account

1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.

2. Follow the online instructions.

   Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a verification code on the phone keypad.

   When you sign up for an AWS account, an AWS account root user is created. The root user has access to all AWS services and resources in the account. As a security best practice, assign administrative access to a user, and use only the root user to perform tasks that require root user access.

AWS sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by going to https://aws.amazon.com/ and choosing My Account.

Create a user with administrative access

After you sign up for an AWS account, secure your AWS account root user, enable AWS IAM Identity Center, and create an administrative user so that you don't use the root user for everyday tasks.

Secure your AWS account root user

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the account owner by choosing Root user and entering your AWS account email address. On the next page, enter your password.

   For help signing in by using root user, see Signing in as the root user in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

2. Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your root user.

   For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for your AWS account root user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

Create a user with administrative access

1. Enable IAM Identity Center.

   For instructions, see Enabling AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

2. In IAM Identity Center, grant administrative access to a user.

   For a tutorial about using the IAM Identity Center directory as your identity source, see Configure user access with the default IAM Identity Center directory in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Sign in as the user with administrative access

• To sign in with your IAM Identity Center user, use the sign-in URL that was sent to your email address when you created the IAM Identity Center user.

  For help signing in using an IAM Identity Center user, see Signing in to the AWS access portal in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

Assign access to additional users

1. In IAM Identity Center, create a permission set that follows the best practice of applying least-privilege permissions.

   For instructions, see Create a permission set in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

2. Assign users to a group, and then assign single sign-on access to the group.

   For instructions, see Add groups in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Prerequisites

To follow the procedures in this guide, you will need a command line terminal or shell to run commands. Commands are shown in listings preceded by a prompt symbol ($) and the name of the current directory, when appropriate.

~/eb-project$ this is a command
this is output

On Linux and macOS, you can use your preferred shell and package manager. On Windows you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux to get a Windows-integrated version of Ubuntu and Bash.

EB CLI

This tutorial uses the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI). For details on installing and configuring the EB CLI, see Install the EB CLI and Configure the EB CLI.

Node.js

Install Node.js on your local machine by following How to install Node.js on the Node.js website.

Verify your Node.js installation by running the following command.

~$ node -v

Step 1: Create a Node.js application

Create a project directory.

~$ mkdir eb-nodejs
~$ cd eb-nodejs

Next, create an application that you'll deploy using Elastic Beanstalk. We'll create a "Hello World" RESTful web service.

Example ~/eb-nodejs/server.js

const http = require('node:http');

const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
const port = 8080;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.statusCode = 200;
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
  res.end('Hello Elastic Beanstalk!\n');
});

server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
  console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
});

This application opens a listener on port 8080. Elastic Beanstalk forwards requests to your application on port 8080 by default for Node.js.

Step 2: Run your application locally

Run the following command to run your application locally.

~/eb-nodejs$ node server.js

You should see the following text.

Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Enter the URL address http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in your web browser. The browser should display “Hello Elastic Beanstalk!”.

Step 3: Deploy your Node.js application with the EB CLI

Run the following commands to create an Elastic Beanstalk environment for this application.

To create an environment and deploy your Node.js application

1. Initialize your EB CLI repository with the eb init command.

   ~/eb-nodejs$ eb init -p node.js nodejs-tutorial --region us-east-2

   This command creates an application named nodejs-tutorial and configures your local repository to create environments with the latest Node.js platform version.

2. (Optional) Run eb init again to configure a default key pair so that you can use SSH to connect to the EC2 instance running your application.

   ~/eb-nodejs$ eb init
   Do you want to set up SSH for your instances?
   (y/n): y
   Select a keypair.
   1) my-keypair
   2) [ Create new KeyPair ]

   Select a key pair if you have one already, or follow the prompts to create one. If you don't see the prompt or need to change your settings later, run eb init -i.

3. Create an environment and deploy your application to it with eb create. Elastic Beanstalk automatically builds a zip file for your application and deploys it to an EC2 instance in the environment. After deploying your application, Elastic Beanstalk starts it on port 8080.

   ~/eb-nodejs$ eb create nodejs-env

   It takes about five minutes for Elastic Beanstalk to create your environment.

Step 4: Run your application on Elastic Beanstalk

When the process to create your environment completes, open your website with eb open.

~/eb-nodejs$ eb open

Congratulations! You've deployed a Node.js application with Elastic Beanstalk! This opens a browser window using the domain name created for your application.

Step 5: Clean up

You can terminate your environment when you finish working with your application. Elastic Beanstalk terminates all AWS resources associated with your environment.

To terminate your Elastic Beanstalk environment with the EB CLI run the following command.

~/eb-nodejs$ eb terminate

AWS resources for your application

You just created a single instance application. It serves as a straightforward sample application with a single EC2 instance, so it doesn't require load balancing or auto scaling. For single instance applications Elastic Beanstalk creates the following AWS resources:

• EC2 instance – An Amazon EC2 virtual machine configured to run web apps on the platform you choose.

  Each platform runs a different set of software, configuration files, and scripts to support a specific language version, framework, web container, or combination thereof. Most platforms use either Apache or nginx as a reverse proxy that processes web traffic in front of your web app, forwards requests to it, serves static assets, and generates access and error logs.

• Instance security group – An Amazon EC2 security group configured to allow incoming traffic on port 80. This resource lets HTTP traffic from the load balancer reach the EC2 instance running your web app. By default, traffic is not allowed on other ports.

• Amazon S3 bucket – A storage location for your source code, logs, and other artifacts that are created when you use Elastic Beanstalk.

• Amazon CloudWatch alarms – Two CloudWatch alarms that monitor the load on the instances in your environment and are triggered if the load is too high or too low. When an alarm is triggered, your Auto Scaling group scales up or down in response.

• AWS CloudFormation stack – Elastic Beanstalk uses AWS CloudFormation to launch the resources in your environment and propagate configuration changes. The resources are defined in a template that you can view in the AWS CloudFormation console.

• Domain name – A domain name that routes to your web app in the form subdomain.region.elasticbeanstalk.com.

Elastic Beanstalk manages all of these resources. When you terminate your environment, Elastic Beanstalk terminates all the resources that it contains.

Next steps

After you have an environment running an application, you can deploy a new version of the application or a different application at any time. Deploying a new application version is very quick because it doesn't require provisioning or restarting EC2 instances. You can also explore your new environment using the Elastic Beanstalk console. For detailed steps, see Explore your environment in the Getting started chapter of this guide.

Try more tutorials

If you'd like to try other tutorials with different example applications, see More example applications and tutorials for Node.js.

After you deploy a sample application or two and are ready to start developing and running Node.js applications locally, see Setting up your Node.js development environment.

Deploy with the Elastic Beanstalk console

You can also use the Elastic Beanstalk console to launch the sample application. For detailed steps, see Create an example application in the Getting started chapter of this guide.