Amazon Elastic Beanstalk node and npm non-standard install locations

Question

Amazon Beanstalk installs node and npm into really obscure places - and I'm not sure they won't change if EB decides to use a newer version of node, which would cause my application to break.

These are the locations for node and npm:

/opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-v0.8.24-linux-x64/bin/node /opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-v0.8.24-linux-x64/bin/npm 

I'm worried about the 0.8.24 part changing and I'd rather not grep for things in cron or monit scripts when trying to find something that is normally just /usr/bin/XXX.

how do I get a consistent filepath for these executables? and why does EB do this?

for reference, I tried setting the NodeVersion option in an .ebextensions/app.config, it had no effect on the install location.

Answer 1

You can add the most recent node and npm binaries to $PATH with a command like this:

PATH=$PATH:`ls -td /opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-* | head -1`/bin 

I couldn't figure out how to prevent beanstalk commands from resetting the $PATH back again.

If you are so inclined you can probably create a symlink with a command similar to the above and use that as your reference point in cron scripts etc.

Agreed, it is very very annoying.

Answer 2

Following Peter Johnson & Greg Tatum replies I created a symlink to the latest node executable:

container_commands:   01_node_binary:     command: "ln -sf `ls -td /opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-* | head -1`/bin/node /bin/node" 

• I find the latest version of the node install binary
• Out of it I create a symlink in the /bin directory (which is part of the $PATH)