AWS CodeDeploy hangs before ApplicationStop on a Windows Server 2016

Question

I have gotten a little bit stuck with this one. I am trying to use Code Deploy on a Windows Server EC2 instance with no luck, it keeps getting stuck before Application Stop and all phases are Pending until it fails then they are all Skipped.

What I've checked so far:

1. I have installed the Code-Deploy Agent on the server and made sure it was running
2. I have checked and double checked the in-bound and out-bound permissions on the EC2 instance (allowed all HTTP/HTTPS requests)
3. I have checked the IAM role on the Code Deploy application itself (I have given all the permissions i can think of)
4. I checked the appspec.yml (it only needs to transfer build files from the build phase to a folder on the EC2 itself

version: 0.0
os: windows
files:
  - source: \path
    destination: \path
hooks:
    BeforeInstall:
    AfterInstall:
    ApplicationStart:

I have no idea why this would happen (I've deployed on Linux instances without this problem - the agent always started reading the appspec.yml)

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

By design, ApplicationStop is always executed from your last successful deployment's archive since that's when you started your application. This way CodeDeploy makes sure the scripts used for starting and stopping an application belong to the same revision [1]. We don't have complete data, but it could be that the ApplicationStop script from last deployment is causing the issue.

As per [1]:

If the cause of the failure is a script from the last successful deployment that never runs successfully, create a deployment and specify that the ApplicationStop, BeforeBlockTraffic, and AfterBlockTraffic failures should be ignored. There are two ways to do this:

• Use the CodeDeploy console to create a deployment. On the Create deployment page, under ApplicationStop lifecycle event failure, choose Don't fail the deployment to an instance if this lifecycle event on the instance fails.

• Use the AWS CLI to call the create-deployment command and include the --ignore-application-stop-failures option.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/troubleshooting-deployments.html#troubleshooting-deployments-lifecycle-event-failures

Answer 2

If any future readers com across this thread then may I refer them to the following article which helped me with a "Net::OpenTimeout" error in CodeDeploy that manifested itself in a similar way. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/codedeploy-net-opentimeout-errors/