Elastic Beanstalk with development and production environment?

Question

I made a Django project and have successfully deployed it to an Elastic Beanstalk environment, let's say it's called app_name. However, I realized I needed 2 environments: development and production. The purpose of this is so I can try things out in development, and when I know it's fully working, I can deploy it in production for the public to use.

I tried looking around their documentations and found Managing multiple Elastic Beanstalk environments as a group with the EB CLI . It basically says you can create a group of environments in one project with the command:

~/workspace/project-name$ eb create --modules component-a component-b --env-group-suffix group-name

However, I'm not sure what a group means. I mean, I just need a development and production environment.

I'm fairly new at this. How do I create and manage development and production environments for this purpose? I would ever be so grateful if someone were to shed some light to my problem.

Answer 1

Running a group of environments is more for different services doing different things. You would have an environment that handles Service One, and an environment that handles Service Two etc. This isn't really what you want.

You just need an environment in the same application as your production environment. It doesn't have to be in the same application but I like it that way because its useful for deploying an app version to dev, and then deploy the app version to prod once it's tested.

An easy way to do this is run eb clone app_name (where app_name is the name of your production environment)

This will clone your production environment and prompt you to give it a name, which you might set to app_name_dev. From there you can edit your dev environment to make it more suitable for dev (maybe you'd make the instances smaller, change software variables like MAIL_DRIVER=mailgun to MAIL_DRIVER=mailtrap, connect it to a dev database instead of your prod database, etc)

The downside of doing this would be if your production environment is currently running jobs or doing anything meaningful, you may not want to clone it right away since the new dev environment could start doing these things too, before you manage to update its config to point to a dev DB etc! If this is the case, you would just run eb create my_app_dev and configure it from scratch.