Elastic Beanstalk: Update AMI + node version at the same time

Question

We have a system that's been sitting on an old version of node for a long time and wanted to update to a newer version.

Updating via the web dashboard doesn't allow you to change the node instance and the AMI at the same time.

We were on node 7.6, and there are no newer available AMIs that support node 7.6

Below is how we used eb saved configurations to achieve this

Answer 1

You can change the configuration file and then apply it to change the AMI and the node version at the same time.

Install the eb-cli if you haven't already

Save the existing configuration

Run

eb config save

To save the configuration

Edit the saved file and change the version number of the AMI and the node version number. (Make sure to check here that you specify the exact version number of node that is available on that AMI)

Upload the configuration to S3

eb config put <name of config file>

Load the Configuration onto your server(s)

1. Go to your elastic beanstalk console
2. Choose your app
3. Click on saved configurations
4. Have a look at the saved configuration, it should say the correct AMI name
5. Select the configuration and click load to load it onto your existing EB environment

I found that we had to rebuild our environment after this, and do some troubleshooting on npm install.

Now that's done, enable managed updates so you don't have to do it again :-)