Allow uploading application version without deployment to environment

Tell us about your request

In our CI system, I would like to build and upload application versions. I don’t want to commit my .eb configuration, I just want to run a command like eb deploy --application MyApp --label "$GIT_SHA" --description "$GIT_COMMIT_MSG".

Currently, the file .elasticbeanstalk/config.yml has to exist, and there’s no way to say “just upload the build, don’t deploy it to an environment”.

Are you currently working around this issue?

Building and uploading app version with a standalone shell script using aws cli.

Additional context

I would be happy to work on this, but I think some architectural decisions have to be made:

• Will this FR be accepted
• How to implement commands which don’t require eb init

[halcarleton]

Gotcha, well it seems reasonable to me to want to create an application version outside of a deploy/create action. Especially because this is functionality that is supported in the AWS EB console.

I will leave this open while we review adding this to our roadmap.

[orestis]

Just chipping in here, we have a similar requirement with a different use case:

• We want to be able to easily deploy any “green” branch (e.g. branches that pass all CI tests)
• But we don’t want to immediately deploy when tests pass, just do all the pre-compilation etc and upload the build artifact somewhere (this could be S3 or something similar)
• Then when we are ready to go, we can point to a pre-built artifact and deploy, which means we don’t have to go through building everything again.

Being able to generate and upload an artefact that’s ready for deployment would allow this workflow.