Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

AppSpec 'files' section (EC2/On-Premises deployments only)

Provides information to CodeDeploy about which files from your application revision should be installed on the instance during the deployment's Install event. This section is required only if you are copying files from your revision to locations on the instance during deployment.

This section has the following structure:

files:
  - source: source-file-location-1
    destination: destination-file-location-1
file_exists_behavior: DISALLOW|OVERWRITE|RETAIN

Multiple source and destination pairs can be set.

The source instruction identifies a file or directory from your revision to copy to the instance:

The paths used in source are relative to the appspec.yml file, which should be at the root of your revision. For details on the file structure of a revision, see Plan a revision for CodeDeploy.

The destination instruction identifies the location on the instance where the files should be copied. This must be a fully qualified path such as /root/destination/directory (on Linux, RHEL, and Ubuntu) or c:\destination\folder (on Windows).

source and destination are each specified with a string.

The file_exists_behavior instruction is optional, and specifies how CodeDeploy handles files that already exist in a deployment target location but weren't part of the previous successful deployment. This setting can take any of the following values:

When using the file_exists_behavior setting, understand that this setting:

Here's an example files section for an Amazon Linux, Ubuntu Server, or RHEL instance.

files:
  - source: Config/config.txt
    destination: /webapps/Config
  - source: source
    destination: /webapps/myApp

In this example, the following two operations are performed during the Install event:

'Files' section examples

The following examples show how to specify the files section. Although these examples describe Windows Server file and directory (folder) structures, they can easily be adapted for Amazon Linux, Ubuntu Server, and RHEL instances.

For the following examples, we assume these files appear in the bundle in the root of source:

# 1) Copy only my-file.txt to the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: .\my-file.txt
    destination: c:\temp
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\my-file.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 2) Copy only my-file-2.txt and my-file-3.txt to the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: my-file-2.txt
    destination: c:\temp
  - source: my-file-3.txt
    destination: c:\temp
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-file-3.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 3) Copy my-file.txt, my-file-2.txt, and my-file-3.txt (along with the appspec.yml file) to the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: \
    destination: c:\temp
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\appspec.yml
#   c:\temp\my-file.txt
#   c:\temp\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-file-3.txt

For the following examples, we assume the appspec.yml appears in the bundle in the root of source along with a folder named my-folder that contains three files:

# 4) Copy the 3 files in my-folder (but do not copy my-folder itself) to the destination folder c:\temp. 
#
files:
  - source: .\my-folder
    destination: c:\temp
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\my-file.txt
#   c:\temp\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-file-3.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 5) Copy my-folder and its 3 files to my-folder within the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: .\my-folder
    destination: c:\temp\my-folder
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file.txt
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-3.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 6) Copy the 3 files in my-folder to other-folder within the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: .\my-folder
    destination: c:\temp\other-folder
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\other-folder\my-file.txt
#   c:\temp\other-folder\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\other-folder\my-file-3.txt	
#
# ---------------------
#
# 7) Copy only my-file-2.txt and my-file-3.txt to my-folder within the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: .\my-folder\my-file-2.txt
    destination: c:\temp\my-folder
  - source: .\my-folder\my-file-3.txt
    destination: c:\temp\my-folder
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-3.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 8) Copy only my-file-2.txt and my-file-3.txt to other-folder within the destination folder c:\temp.
#
files:
  - source: .\my-folder\my-file-2.txt
    destination: c:\temp\other-folder
  - source: .\my-folder\my-file-3.txt
    destination: c:\temp\other-folder
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\other-folder\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\other-folder\my-file-3.txt
#
# ---------------------
#
# 9) Copy my-folder and its 3 files (along with the appspec.yml file) to the destination folder c:\temp. If any of the files already exist on the instance, overwrite them.
#
files:
  - source: \
    destination: c:\temp
file_exists_behavior: OVERWRITE
#
# Result:
#   c:\temp\appspec.yml
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file.txt
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-2.txt
#   c:\temp\my-folder\my-file-3.txt