Deploying a Go application to Elastic Beanstalk

This tutorial walks you through the process of creating a Go application and deploying it to an Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have knowledge of the basic Elastic Beanstalk operations and the Elastic Beanstalk console. If you haven't already, follow the instructions in Getting started using Elastic Beanstalk to launch your first Elastic Beanstalk environment.

To follow the procedures in this guide, you will need a command line terminal or shell to run commands. Commands are shown in listings preceded by a prompt symbol ($) and the name of the current directory, when appropriate.

~/eb-project$ this is a command
this is output

On Linux and macOS, you can use your preferred shell and package manager. On Windows 10, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux to get a Windows-integrated version of Ubuntu and Bash.

This tutorial uses the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI). For details on installing and configuring the EB CLI, see Install the EB CLI and Configure the EB CLI.

Create a Go application

Create a project directory.

~$ mkdir eb-go
~$ cd eb-go

Next, create an application that you'll deploy using Elastic Beanstalk. We'll create a "Hello World" RESTful web service.

This example prints a customized greeting that varies based on the path used to access the service.

Create a text file in this directory named application.go with the following contents.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	if r.URL.Path == "/" {
		fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello World! Append a name to the URL to say hello. For example, use %s/Mary to say hello to Mary.", r.Host)
	} else {
		fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, %s!", r.URL.Path[1:])
	}
}

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
	http.ListenAndServe(":5000", nil)
}

Deploy your Go application with the EB CLI

Next, you create your application environment and deploy your configured application with Elastic Beanstalk.

Environment creation takes about five minutes and creates the following resources:

Elastic Beanstalk manages all of these resources. When you terminate your environment, Elastic Beanstalk terminates all the resources that it contains.

When the environment creation process completes, open your website with eb open.

~/eb-go$ eb open

This opens a browser window using the domain name created for your application.

If you don't see your application running, or get an error message, see Troubleshooting Deployments for help with how to determine the cause of the error.

If you do see your application running, then congratulations, you've deployed a Go application with Elastic Beanstalk!

Clean up

When you finish working with Elastic Beanstalk, you can terminate your environment. Elastic Beanstalk terminates all Amazon resources associated with your environment, such as Amazon EC2 instances, database instances, load balancers, security groups, and alarms.

With Elastic Beanstalk, you can easily create a new environment for your application at any time.

Or, with the EB CLI, do the following.

~/eb-go$ eb terminate