How does AWS Beanstalk use NPM when deploying a Nodejs App?

Question

I'm curious about the overall workflow of an AWS Beanstalk deployment. I'm assuming it runs npm at some point to get the packages installed on the server(s). But I was just wondering if AWS Beanstalk uses the latest command of 'npm install --production' to install packages. Currently I have a packages.json file as shown below and would like to insure if possible that only the dependencies are being installed and not the devDependencies.

"dependencies": {   "express": "3.4.4",   "jade": "*",   "restify": "~2.6.0",   "assert": "~1.0.0",   "orchestrate": "0.0.2",   "chance": "~0.5.3" },  "devDependencies": {   "mocha": "~1.15.1" } 

Answer 1

You can get AWS Elastic Beanstalk to run npm install in production mode if you set the environment variable NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=true. You can do this through the Elastic Beanstalk web console.

Alternatively, save the following text to any file with suffix .config inside a directory called .ebextensions in the project root and you can achieve the same thing without having to set them every time in the web console:

option_settings:    - option_name: NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION     value: true 

Note: make sure you're using spaces, not tabs, as it's YAML format.

I found that the time to update new node.js code in a t1.micro environment went down from about 5 minutes to 90 seconds, now that it wasn't installing all the devDependencies such as grunt, karma, mocha, etc.