AWS Responses from [i-2a7fe91f] were received, but the commands failed

Question

I have a 64 bit Tomcat 7 server on AWS with the default settings. I use Elastic Beanstalk to manage my instances. Sometimes when I deploy a new version, it doesn't work and shows me an error:

Responses from [i-2a7fe91f] were received, but the commands failed.

The thing is it happens half of the times, not all the times. When I get this error, I terminate the environment and create a new one with the same WAR file and it works fine! However, I was wondering if anyone knows what is really happening.

Here's a part of log file that I think is relevant:

2013-05-23 17:12:02,555 [INFO] (20168 MainThread) [command.py-122] [root command execute] Executing command: Infra-WriteApplication2 - AWSEBAutoScalingGroup
2013-05-23 17:12:11,401 [INFO] (20168 MainThread) [command.py-130] [root command execute] Command returned: (code: 1, stdout: Error occurred during build: 
, stderr: None)
2013-05-23 17:12:11,432 [DEBUG] (20168 MainThread) [commandWrapper.py-60] [root commandWrapper main] Command result: {'status': 'FAILURE', 'results': [{'status': 'FAILURE', 'config_set': u'Infra-WriteApplication2', 'returncode': 1, 'events': [], 'msg': 'Error occurred during build: \n'}], 'api_version': '1.0'}

Answer 1

I encountered the same error message. In my case one of the commands in the .config file did not execute. There was no problem with the command itself, it turned out that I was missing a library which prevented the command from executing fully. The problem was resolved when I made the necessary changes to the requirements file.

What helped in my case was looking through the log file and locating the culprit.