Environment variables removed when deploying

Description

Deploying clears a previously set environment variable.

• I am using an env.yml but it does not contain a section for environment variables

I have tried:

• specifying the env var on the create step using --envvar, but this seems to have no effect, no env var is made
• adding an env var to env.yml and then trying to get it overridden during create using --envvar, again, the parameter has no effect, and the value in env.yml gets set

Why don’t I simply just put my env var details into env.yml if that is working? Because I create and deploy both a staging and a production environment for each module, and I need to set a different value for the env var.

Why don’t I simply script a deploy followed by a setenv and call it a day? Because this results in downtime!

Steps to reproduce

1. eb create --modules priority-score-calculator --env-group-suffix staging
2. cd priority-score-calculator
3. eb setenv NODE_ENV=staging -e priority-score-staging
4. cd ..
5. eb deploy --modules priority-score-calculator --env-group-suffix staging

Observed result

The env var set through setenv gets blitzed by the deploy command.

Expected result

Tthe env var set through setenv is not modified by the deploy

Additional environment details (Ex: Windows, Mac, Amazon Linux etc)

1. OS: Mac
2. EB CLI - installed via brew: EB CLI 3.17.0 (Python 3.8.1)

[halcarleton]

Ok, I was able to reproduce the issue. If I am understanding correctly, you do not define any environment properties in your env.yml, but you do define option settings. It appears that the Elastic Beanstalk service is removing your environment variables, which means this is not an EB CLI bug. I would recommend reporting this on the AWS Elastic Beanstalk forum.

You should be able to reproduce the issue with the awscli by running the following command instead of eb deploy in your repro steps:

aws elasticbeanstalk compose-environments --application-name <application_name> --group-name <group_name> --version-labels <latest_appliction_version_label>

A workaround you could try in the meantime is to define your option settings in .ebextensions instead of in your env.yml. More info on that here.

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Closing this issue as it isn’t specific to EB CLI.

[jcw-]

If I am understanding correctly, you do not define any environment properties in your env.yml, but you do define option settings.

Correct - thanks for narrowing it down, I’ll submit an issue on the other forum.

Also thanks for the option settings in .ebextensions tip, I’ll try that.