You can use an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instance to store data that your application gathers and modifies. The database can be attached to your environment and managed by Elastic Beanstalk, or created and managed externally.

If you are using Amazon RDS for the first time, add a DB instance to a test environment by using the Elastic Beanstalk console and verify that your application can connect to it.

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

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

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

In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.

In the Database configuration category, choose Edit.

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

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:

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 an internal DB instance, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment. For instructions on configuring an external database for use with Elastic Beanstalk, see Using Elastic Beanstalk with Amazon RDS.

To connect to the database, add the appropriate driver JAR file to your application, load the driver class in your code, and create a connection object with the environment properties provided by Elastic Beanstalk.

You will need the JAR file of the JDBC driver for the DB engine that you choose. Save the JAR file in your source code and include it in your classpath when you compile the class that creates connections to the database.

You can find the latest driver for your DB engine in the following locations:

MySQL – MySQL Connector/J

Oracle SE-1 – Oracle JDBC Driver

Postgres – PostgreSQL JDBC Driver

SQL Server – Microsoft JDBC Driver

To use the JDBC driver, call Class.forName() to load it before creating the connection with DriverManager.getConnection() in your code.

JDBC uses a connection string in the following format:

You can retrieve the hostname, port, database name, user name, and password from the environment variables that Elastic Beanstalk provides to your application. The driver name is specific to your database type and driver version. The following are example driver names:

mysql for MySQL

postgresql for PostgreSQL

oracle:thin for Oracle Thin

oracle:oci for Oracle OCI

oracle:oci8 for Oracle OCI 8

oracle:kprb for Oracle KPRB

sqlserver for SQL Server

In a Java SE environment, use System.getenv() to read the connection variables from the environment. The following example code shows a class that creates a connection to a PostgreSQL database.

In a Tomcat environment, environment properties are provided as system properties that are accessible with System.getProperty().

The following example code shows a class that creates a connection to a PostgreSQL database.

If you have trouble getting a connection or running SQL statements, try placing the following code in a JSP file. This code connects to a DB instance, creates a table, and writes to it.

To display the results, place the following code in the body of the HTML portion of the JSP file.

Established connection to RDS. Read first two rows:

If you run into issues connecting to a database from within your application, review the web container log and database.

You can view all the logs from your Elastic Beanstalk environment from within Eclipse. If you don't have the AWS Explorer view open, choose the arrow next to the orange AWS icon in the toolbar, and then choose Show AWS Explorer View. Expand AWS Elastic Beanstalk and your environment name, and then open the context (right-click) menu for the server. Choose Open in WTP Server Editor.

Choose the Log tab of the Server view to see the aggregate logs from your environment. To open the latest logs, choose the Refresh button at the upper right corner of the page.

Scroll down to locate the Tomcat logs in /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.out. If you loaded the webpage from our earlier example several times, you might see the following.

All information that the web application sends to standard output appears in the web container log. In the previous example, the application tries to create the table every time the page loads. This results in catching a SQL exception on every page load after the first one.

As an example, the preceding is acceptable. But in actual applications, keep your database definitions in schema objects, perform transactions from within model classes, and coordinate requests with controller servlets.

You can connect directly to the RDS DB instance in your Elastic Beanstalk environment by using the MySQL client application.

First, open the security group to your RDS DB instance to allow traffic from your computer.

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

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

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

In the navigation pane, choose Configuration.

In the Database configuration category, choose Edit.

Next to Endpoint, choose the Amazon RDS console link.

On the RDS Dashboard instance details page, under Security and Network, choose the security group starting with rds- next to Security Groups.

The database might have multiple entries labeled Security Groups. Use the first, which starts with awseb, only if you have an older account that doesn't have a default Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

In Security group details, choose the Inbound tab, and then choose Edit.

Add a rule for MySQL (port 3306) that allows traffic from your IP address, specified in CIDR format.

Choose Save. The changes take effect immediately.

Return to the Elastic Beanstalk configuration details for your environment and note the endpoint. You will use the domain name to connect to the RDS DB instance.

Install the MySQL client and initiate a connection to the database on port 3306. On Windows, install MySQL Workbench from the MySQL home page and follow the prompts.

On Linux, install the MySQL client using the package manager for your distribution. The following example works on Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives.

After you have connected, you can run SQL commands to see the status of the database, whether your tables and rows were created, and other information.