Elastic Beanstalk WordPress

This is an Elastic Beanstalk application version for WordPress running under the Elastic Beanstalk environment created in the ITPro Forum workshop. This code is provided as part of the workshop and will not be regularly updated. You can use it as a base for your own application package.

To build a new package run make eb-appver and it will place a new zip file in the parent directory.

Environment Variables

The following Elastic Beanstalk environment variables are used by this application package.

Variable	WP Define	Description
WP_HOME	WP_HOME	Home page URL. Used if not the values changeme or blank.
WP_SITEURL	WP_SITEURL	Site URL for WP core files. Used if not the values changeme or blank.
WP_DB_NAME	DB_NAME	Database name.
WP_DB_USER	DB_USER	Database user. Do not use the admin user.
WP_DB_PASSWORD	DB_PASSWORD	Database password.
WP_DB_HOSTNAME	DB_HOST	Database hostname.
WP_AUTH_KEY	AUTH_KEY	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_SECURE_AUTH_KEY	SECURE_AUTH_KEY	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_LOGGED_IN_KEY	LOGGED_IN_KEY	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_NONCE_KEY	NONCE_KEY	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_AUTH_SALT	AUTH_SALT	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_SECURE_AUTH_SALT	SECURE_AUTH_SALT	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_LOGGED_IN_SALT	LOGGED_IN_SALT	Cryptographically secure random value.
WP_NONCE_SALT	NONCE_SALT	Cryptographically secure random value.
EFS_WPCONTENT_ID		EFS ID to mount under /mnt/wpcontent.

Email

To send email from WordPress, configure the WP Mail SMTP plugin. The Elastic Beanstalk environment is not configured to send email. If you would like to use sendmail, then you will need to follow the instructions for email on Amazon Linux.

wp-config.php

The configuration file is stored in this package, but takes settings from the Elastic Beanstalk environment. All automatic updates and file editing is disabled.

If you need to modify the wp-config.php file, ask yourself if the setting is inherent to the application, or if it might change based on the Elastic Beanstalk environment configuration. You should try to keep your applications as generic as possible with respect to the environment they are deployed in.

htaccess

Some WordPress plugins want to write to the htaccess file, and this is a problem with how Elastic Beanstalk works. To solve this, the htaccess file is not writeable by the webapp and is updated periodically from the EFS share. You can edit /mnt/wpcontent/htaccess and within 5 minutes all of your EC2 instances will get the update.

The first time this application is deployed it will initialize the htaccess file from htaccess.dist.

W3 Total Cache

The W3 Total Cache (fixed) plugin is provided in this package but it requires some special configuration. When it asks you to add rules to the htaccess file, follow the process listed above.

The first time you activate the plugin you will have to rebuild your environment. This lets Elastic Beanstalk copy W3TC files into wp-content, and also modifies wp-config.php to enable caching. Changes to the following settings will also need a rebuild of the environment to work:

• Plugin activation/deactivation
• Object caching
• Database caching