I have set up a RoR environement on AWS\' elastic beanstalk. I am able to ssh into my EC2 instance. My home directory is /home/ec2-user, which is effective
None of these solutions mentioned here worked for me, so I cooked up a little script that I put in script/aws-console.
You can run it from the /var/app/current directory as root:
eb ssh cd /var/app/current sudo script/aws-console
My script can be found as a Gist here.