ebextensions: yum does not install package

Question

I am trying to make an ebextensions file which will install wkhtmltopdf.

Currently it looks like this:

packages: 
 yum:
  xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi: []
  libpng: []
  xz: [] 
  urw-fonts: []
  libXext: []
  openssl-devel: []
  libXrender: []
rpm:
   wkhtmltopdf: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/myS3Account/wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-centos5-amd64.rpm

In this case, wkthmltopdf fails to install. I get the following error:

Failed dependencies:
  xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi is needed by wkhtmltox-1:0.12.2.1-1.x86_64

If I use SSH to connect to my EC2 instance, I can sucessfully install wkhtml by manually running "yum install xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi", followed by "wget wkthmltopdf-..." and "rpm --install wkhtmltopdf-..". If I skip the yum step, rpm complains that wkhtmltopdf needs the xorg package.

It seems like xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi is not installed by ebextensions on deploy. Am I doing something wrong?

Solution

According to the docs:

Packages are processed in the following order: rpm, yum, and then rubygems and python.

Elastic beanstalk first processes your rpm package, causing the error and never gets to the yum packages.

There are a few ways to solve this.

1) Run the rpm install through a command like

commands:
    install_wkhtmltox:
        command: yum -y install https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/myS3Account/wkhtmltox-0.12.2.1_linux-centos5-amd64.rpm

This should automatically solve dependencies through yum.

2) Split the .ebextensions files to two: 01_install_dependencies.config and 02_install_wkhtmltox.config. In the 01-file install yum packages, in the 02 file install the rpm. This way you can "override" the package installation order

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/customize-containers-ec2.html#customize-containers-format-packages