Welcome to my blog. This is where I sometimes share interesting stories, challenges and breakthroughs from my journey in the realm of software development.

Amazon Linux 2 ElasticBeanstalk and Apache HTTPD

I recently had to migrate a legacy website from Amazon Linux AMI to the Amazon Linux 2 platform as the former is deprecated and no longer supports managed updates on AWS.

There is no automated way to do the migration so I created a new environment and deployed the application there, then CNAMEd the domain name to the new load balancer address.

Things went along smoothly enough with pretty much all configuration settings being compatible and transferrable. However, once the new environment was created and once my deploy script was done, I got 404 errors everywhere.

Interestingly enough, I noticed the 404 errors were being thrown by Nginx:

404 Not Found
nginx/1.20.0

A bit of digging led me to the revelation that Amazon Linux 2 uses nginx as it’s default proxy server [1]:

Elastic Beanstalk uses nginx as the default reverse proxy to map your application to your Elastic Load Balancing load balancer.

That was no good for me as I wanted to use the existing site’s .htaccess file for url rewrite overrides and I didn’t want to try and translate each .htaccess rule to an equivalent nginx.conf rule.

Luckily, AWS allows you to let Apache’s HTTPD proxy server do your proxying. To do this, you have to create a config file inside your .ebextensions folder (e.g. .ebextensions/httpd-proxy.config) with the following content:

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:environment:proxy:
    ProxyServer: apache

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