I have a Spring Web Service deployed on Elastic Beanstalk. I'm using AWS CloudFormation for the infrastructure and I'm using AWS CodePipeline to deploy the web service automatically from merges to the master branch.
Recently I added DynamoDB integration, and I need to configure a couple things in my application.properties. I attempted to use environment variables to configure the application.properties but I hit a wall when trying to set the environment variables from CodeDeploy.
This is my application.properties
amazon.dynamodb.endpoint=${DYNAMODB_ENDPOINT:http://localhost:8000}
amazon.dynamodb.region=${AWS_REGION:default-region}
amazon.dynamodb.accesskey=${DYNAMODB_ACCESS_KEY:TestAccessKey}
amazon.dynamodb.secretkey=${DYNAMODB_SECRET_KEY:TestSecretKey}
spring.data.dynamodb.entity2ddl.auto = create-drop
spring.data.dynamodb.entity2ddl.gsiProjectionType = ALL
spring.data.dynamodb.entity2ddl.readCapacity = 10
spring.data.dynamodb.entity2ddl.writeCapacity = 1
The defaults are for when I'm running a local DynamoDB instance and they work fine. However, I can't figure out how to get CodeDeploy to set environment variables for me, I also considered getting CloudFormation to set the environment variables, but couldn't find how to do that either. I tried manually setting the environment variables in the EC2 instance but that didn't work and isn't the solution I'm looking for as I'm using EB and want this project to use fully automated deployments. Please let me know if this is possible, what the industry standard is for configuring web services, and if I'm misunderstanding either CodeDeploy or CloudFormation.
In general, it is a bad practice to include access and secret keys in any sort of files or in your deployment automation.
Your instance that your application is deployed to should have an instance profile (i.e. IAM Role) attached to it which should have the appropriate DynamoDB permissions you need.
If you have that instance profile attached, the SDK should automatically be able to detect the credentials, region and endpoint is needs to communicate with.
You may need to update the way you are creating your DynamoDB client to just use the defaults.
To setup your development machine with these properties in a way that the AWS SDK can retrieve without explicitly putting them in properties files, you can run the aws configure command of the AWS CLI which should setup your ~/.aws/ folder with information about your region and credentials to use on your dev machine.