How can I install matplotlib for my AWS Elastic Beanstalk application?

Question

I\'m having a hell of a time deploying matplotlib on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. I gather that my issue comes from some dependencies and the way that EB deploys packages installe

Answer 1

To add to Jan-Philip Answer :

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is using Amazon Linux distribution (except for .Net environments). Amazon Linux uses the yum package manager. MatPlotLib is available in Amazon's software repository.

[ec2-user@ip-1-1-1-174 ~]$ yum list | grep matplot
python-matplotlib.x86_64            0.99.1.2-1.6.amzn1              amzn-main

If this version is the one you need for your application, I would try to simply modify your .ebextensions/software.config file and to add the package to the yum section of it:

packages:
  yum:
    python-matplotlib: [] 
    python-devel: []
    atlas-sse3-devel: []
    lapack-devel: []
    libpng-devel: []
    freetype-devel: []
    zlib-devel: []

A last note about AWS Elastic BeansTalk and SSH.

While Amazon gives you the possibility to SSH to your Elastic Beanstalk instances, you should use this possibility only for debugging purposes, to understand why your app failed or is not installing as suggested.

Other than that, your deployment must be 100% automatic. When Elastic Beanstalk (Auto Scaling to be precise) will scale out your infrastructure (add more instances) or scale it in (terminate instances) depending on your application workload, all your manual configuration will be lost.

Best practices is to not install SSH keys on your production environment, it further reduces the surface of attacks.