Specifying dependencies using a requirements file on Elastic Beanstalk - Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Use pip and requirements.txtUse Pipenv and PipfilePrecedence
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Specifying dependencies using a requirements file on Elastic Beanstalk

This topic describes how to configure you application to install other Python packages that it requires. A typical Python application has dependencies on other third-party Python packages. With the Elastic Beanstalk Python platform, you have multiple ways to specify Python packages that your application depends on.

Use pip and requirements.txt

The standard tool for installing Python packages is pip. It has a feature that allows you to specify all the packages you need (as well as their versions) in a single requirements file. For more information about the requirements file, see Requirements File Format on the pip documentation website.

Create a file named requirements.txt and place it in the top-level directory of your source bundle. The following is an example requirements.txt file for Django.

Django==2.2
mysqlclient==2.0.3

In your development environment, you can use the pip freeze command to generate your requirements file.

~/my-app$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

To ensure that your requirements file only contains packages that are actually used by your application, use a virtual environment that only has those packages installed. Outside of a virtual environment, the output of pip freeze will include all pip packages installed on your development machine, including those that came with your operating system.

Note

On Amazon Linux AMI Python platform versions, Elastic Beanstalk doesn't natively support Pipenv or Pipfiles. If you use Pipenv to manage your application's dependencies, run the following command to generate a requirements.txt file.

~/my-app$ pipenv lock -r > requirements.txt

To learn more, see Generating a requirements.txt in the Pipenv documentation.

Use Pipenv and Pipfile

Pipenv is a modern Python packaging tool. It combines package installation with the creation and management of a dependency file and a virtualenv for your application. For more information, see Pipenv: Python Dev Workflow for Humans.

Pipenv maintains two files:

  • Pipfile — This file contains various types of dependencies and requirements.

  • Pipfile.lock — This file contains a version snapshot that enables deterministic builds.

You can create these files on your development environment and include them in the top-level directory of the source bundle that you deploy to Elastic Beanstalk. For more information about these two files, see Example Pipfile and Pipfile.lock.

The following example uses Pipenv to install Django and the Django REST framework. These commands create the files Pipfile and Pipfile.lock.

~/my-app$ pipenv install django
~/my-app$ pipenv install djangorestframework

Precedence

If you include more than one of the requirements files described in this topic, Elastic Beanstalk uses just one of them. The following list shows the precedence, in descending order.

  1. requirements.txt

  2. Pipfile.lock

  3. Pipfile

Note

Starting with the March 7, 2023 Amazon Linux 2 platform release, if you provide more than one of these files, Elastic Beanstalk will issue a console message stating which one of the dependency files was used during a deployment.

The following steps describe the logic that Elastic Beanstalk follows to install the dependencies when it's deploying an instance.

  • If there is a requirements.txt file, we use the command pip install -r requirements.txt.

  • Starting with the March 7, 2023 Amazon Linux 2 platform release, if there is no requirements.txt file, but there is a Pipfile.lock, we use the command pipenv sync. Prior to that release, we used pipenv install --ignore-pipfile.

  • If there is neither a requirements.txt file nor a Pipfile.lock, but there is a Pipfile, we use the command pipenv install --skip-lock.

  • If none of the three requirements files are found, we don't install any application dependencies.