Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your .NET application environment - AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Adding a DB instance to your environmentDownloading a driverConnecting to a database

Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your .NET application environment

This topic provides instructions to create an Amazon RDS using the Elastic Beanstalk console. You can use an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instance to store data gathered and modified by your application. The database can be coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk, or it can be created as decoupled and managed externally by another service. In these instructions the database is coupled to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk. For more information about integrating an Amazon RDS with Elastic Beanstalk, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Adding a DB instance to your environment

To add a DB instance to your environment

  1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console, and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Environments, and then choose the name of your environment from the list.

    Note

    If you have many environments, use the search bar to filter the environment list.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.

  4. In the Database configuration category, choose Edit.

  5. Choose a DB engine, and enter a user name and password.

  6. To save the changes choose Apply at the bottom of the page.

Adding a DB instance takes about 10 minutes. When the environment update is complete, the DB instance's hostname and other connection information are available to your application through the following environment properties:

Property name Description Property value

RDS_HOSTNAME

The hostname of the DB instance.

On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Endpoint.

RDS_PORT

The port where the DB instance accepts connections. The default value varies among DB engines.

On the Connectivity & security tab on the Amazon RDS console: Port.

RDS_DB_NAME

The database name, ebdb.

On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: DB Name.

RDS_USERNAME

The username that you configured for your database.

On the Configuration tab on the Amazon RDS console: Master username.

RDS_PASSWORD

The password that you configured for your database.

Not available for reference in the Amazon RDS console.

For more information about configuring a database instance coupled with an Elastic Beanstalk environment, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Downloading a driver

Download and install the EntityFramework package and a database driver for your development environment with NuGet.

Common entity framework database providers for .NET

  • SQL Server – Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer

  • MySQL – Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql

  • PostgreSQL – Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL

Connecting to a database

Elastic Beanstalk provides connection information for attached DB instances in environment properties. Use ConfigurationManager.AppSettings to read the properties and configure a database connection.

Example Helpers.cs - connection string method
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;

namespace MVC5App.Models
{
  public class Helpers
  {
    public static string GetRDSConnectionString()
    {
      var appConfig = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings;

      string dbname = appConfig["RDS_DB_NAME"];

      if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(dbname)) return null;

      string username = appConfig["RDS_USERNAME"];
      string password = appConfig["RDS_PASSWORD"];
      string hostname = appConfig["RDS_HOSTNAME"];
      string port = appConfig["RDS_PORT"];

      return "Data Source=" + hostname + ";Initial Catalog=" + dbname + ";User ID=" + username + ";Password=" + password + ";";
    }
  }
}

Use the connection string to initialize your database context.

Example DBContext.cs
using System.Data.Entity;
using System.Security.Claims;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity;
using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework;

namespace MVC5App.Models
{
  public class RDSContext : DbContext
  { 
    public RDSContext()
      : base(GetRDSConnectionString())
    {
    }

    public static RDSContext Create()
    {
      return new RDSContext();
    }
  }
}