Amazon Elastic Beanstalk node and npm non-standard install locations
Amazon Beanstalk installs node and npm into really obscure places - and I'm not sure they won't change if EB decides to use a newer version of node, which would cause my application to break.
These are the locations for node and npm:
/opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-v0.8.24-linux-x64/bin/node
/opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-v0.8.24-linux-x64/bin/npm
I'm worried about the 0.8.24 part changing and I'd rather not grep for things in cron or monit scripts when trying to find something that is normally just /usr/bin/XXX.
how do I get a consistent filepath for these executables? and why does EB do this?
for reference, I tried setting the NodeVersion option in an .ebextensions/app.config, it had no effect on the install location.
Answer
You can add the most recent node and npm binaries to $PATH with a command like this:
PATH=$PATH:`ls -td /opt/elasticbeanstalk/node-install/node-* | head -1`/bin
I couldn't figure out how to prevent beanstalk commands from resetting the $PATH back again.
If you are so inclined you can probably create a symlink with a command similar to the above and use that as your reference point in cron scripts etc.
Agreed, it is very very annoying.