Deploy Yeoman-Generated Angular Apps to AWS

The Generator

I'm creating an app based off of the Yeoman Angular fullstack generator.

It does a lot of cool things, like generating boilerplate, simplifying workflow with many Grunt tasks, and including lots of testing options.

I ran into two problems with it:
1) It doesn deploy to AWS out-of-the-box.
2) It isn't easy to use any database besides MongoDB.

This post deals with the former. I'll write another soon that deals with swapping-out MongoDB for sequelize.

Why doesn't it work?

The docs for this generator make it easy to deploy to heroku.

The way that grunt-build-control accomplishes this is by establishing a remote and pushing to it.

Elastic Beanstalk on AWS doesn't have remotes.

Not only that, but it only pushes the dist/ directory.

eb deploy will push everything.

The Workaround

Sadly, you won't be able to use grunt, but you'll be ok, I promise.

1. Remove any Elastic Beanstalk files in the repo. FYI, they're hidden.
2. Using the terminal, cd dist/ from the project's root folder.
3. Run git init to create a local git repo within dist/.
4. Make an initial commit, because dist/ has always been .gitignore-d.
5. Run 1eb init,eb create,eb deployas normal withindist/`.
6. Set your environmental variables, if you need them.
7. eb open, with your fingers crossed.

Other reading

Stack Overflow