Using the Elastic Beanstalk PHP platform

This topic describes how to configure, build, and run your PHP applications on Elastic Beanstalk.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a number of platform branches for different versions of the PHP programming language. These platforms support PHP web applications that can run alone or under Composer. See PHP in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Platforms document for a full list of supported platform branches.

Elastic Beanstalk provides configuration options that you can use to customize the software that runs on the EC2 instances in your Elastic Beanstalk environment. You can configure environment variables required by your application, enable log rotation to Amazon S3, map folders in your application source that contain static files to paths served by the proxy server, and set common PHP initialization settings.

Configuration options are available in the Elastic Beanstalk console for modifying the configuration of a running environment. To avoid losing your environment's configuration when you terminate it, you can use saved configurations to save your settings and later apply them to another environment.

To save settings in your source code, you can include configuration files. Settings in configuration files are applied every time you create an environment or deploy your application. You can also use configuration files to install packages, run scripts, and perform other instance customization operations during deployments.

If you use Composer, you can include a composer.json file in your source bundle to install packages during deployment.

For advanced PHP configuration and PHP settings that are not provided as configuration options, you can use configuration files to provide an INI file that can extend and override the default settings applied by Elastic Beanstalk, or install additional extensions.

Settings applied in the Elastic Beanstalk console override the same settings in configuration files, if they exist. This lets you have default settings in configuration files, and override them with environment-specific settings in the console. For more information about precedence, and other methods of changing settings, see Configuration options.

For details about the various ways you can extend an Elastic Beanstalk Linux-based platform, see Extending Elastic Beanstalk Linux platforms.

Considerations for PHP 8.1 on Amazon Linux 2

Read this section if you're using the PHP 8.1 on Amazon Linux 2 platform branch.

$rpm -i /opt/elasticbeanstalk/RPMS/php-debuginfo-8.1.8-1.amzn2.x86_64.rpm

$pecl install memcache

$pear install pecl/memcache

$pecl install redis

$pear install pecl/redis

Configuring your PHP environment

You can use the Elastic Beanstalk console to enable log rotation to Amazon S3, configure variables that your application can read from the environment, and change PHP settings.

PHP settings

Log options

The Log Options section has two settings:

Static files

To improve performance, you can use the Static files section to configure the proxy server to serve static files (for example, HTML or images) from a set of directories inside your web application. For each directory, you set the virtual path to directory mapping. When the proxy server receives a request for a file under the specified path, it serves the file directly instead of routing the request to your application.

For details about configuring static files using configuration files or the Elastic Beanstalk console, see Serving static files.

Environment properties

The Environment Properties section lets you specify environment configuration settings on the Amazon EC2 instances that are running your application. These settings are passed in as key-value pairs to the application.

Your application code can access environment properties by using $_SERVER or the get_cfg_var function.

$endpoint = $_SERVER['API_ENDPOINT'];

See Environment properties and other software settings for more information.

Namespaces for configuration

You can use a configuration file to set configuration options and perform other instance configuration tasks during deployments. Configuration options can be platform specific or apply to all platforms in the Elastic Beanstalk service as a whole. Configuration options are organized into namespaces.

The following namespaces configure both your proxy service and PHP specific options:

The following example configuration file specifies a static files option that maps a directory named staticimages to the path /images, and shows settings for each of the options available in the aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:php:phpini namespace:

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:environment:proxy:
    ProxyServer: apache
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:environment:proxy:staticfiles:
    /images: staticimages
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:php:phpini:
    document_root: /public
    memory_limit: 128M
    zlib.output_compression: "Off"
    allow_url_fopen: "On"
    display_errors: "Off"
    max_execution_time: 60
    composer_options: vendor/package

Elastic Beanstalk provides many configuration options for customizing your environment. In addition to configuration files, you can also set configuration options using the console, saved configurations, the EB CLI, or the AWS CLI. See Configuration options for more information.