Install aws-elasticbeanstalk with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• eb
• ebp

Project history

Elastic Beanstalk itself was announced by AWS on January 19, 2011 as a managed application deployment service that provisions capacity, load balancing, auto scaling, and health monitoring around uploaded applications. The EB CLI grew around that platform as the developer-friendly local workflow for Beanstalk projects.

The current EB CLI repository states that the CLI is now open source and hosted on GitHub. Its README presents the project as the command-line interface for deploying and managing Elastic Beanstalk applications and environments, with integration with Git and contribution through issues and pull requests.

The upstream changelog shows an actively maintained 3.x line. Recent entries include Python dependency support work, region and bucket updates, IIS migration helpers, remote execution work, Python 3.12 support, and security fixes for local state deserialization and zip extraction.

Adoption history

The EB CLI became the Beanstalk-specific companion to general AWS CLI usage: AWS documentation explicitly contrasts the lower-level AWS CLI sequence for creating environments with the EB CLI's project-oriented single-command workflow. That made `eb init`, `eb create`, `eb deploy`, and related commands standard muscle memory for Beanstalk users.

Homebrew analytics showed 316 installs in 30 days, 1,512 in 90 days, and 8,175 in 365 days at the time of this batch. Those figures are modest relative to the AWS CLI, but healthy for a service-specific deployment tool whose main distribution path also includes pip and AWS's setup scripts.

How it is used

Typical usage starts by installing the CLI, configuring a project directory, and running commands such as `eb create` or `eb deploy`. AWS documentation says the EB CLI can create environments with a single command after installation and configuration.

The CLI stores project settings in `.elasticbeanstalk/config.yml` and reads credentials from command-line options, environment variables, shared AWS credentials and config files, the legacy EB CLI config file, and EC2 instance profile credentials, in that documented precedence order.

Why package nerds care

For package-manager people, aws-elasticbeanstalk is a classic example of a cloud vendor's service-specific CLI packaged outside the service's own installer story. The Homebrew formula wraps the Python `awsebcli` distribution, while AWS still recommends a separate setup-script repository for users who want an isolated virtual environment and pinned dependencies.

Timeline

• 2011: AWS announces Elastic Beanstalk beta.
• 3.x: EB CLI is maintained as the open-source `aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli` project.
• 2024: EB CLI 3.21.0 updates dependencies and declares support boundaries around Python versions.
• 2026: EB CLI 3.27.x changelog entries include AI log analysis, region updates, and security fixes.

Related projects

• aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli-setup: AWS's recommended setup-script installer repository.
• AWS CLI Elastic Beanstalk commands: lower-level API access for the same service.
• Elastic Beanstalk `.ebextensions`: application-source configuration files used by the service.

Sources

• https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/01/19/introducing-aws-elastic-beanstalk-beta/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb-cli3-configuration.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/eb-cli3.html
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/aws-elasticbeanstalk.json
• https://github.com/aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/aws-elastic-beanstalk-cli/master/CHANGES.rst