Using EvoPdf Next for .NET in AWS Elastic Beanstalk on Windows

EvoPdf Next for .NET is a library that can be integrated into applications running in AWS Elastic Beanstalk on Windows to create and process PDF documents.

You can create PDF documents, convert HTML, Word, Excel, RTF and Markdown documents to PDF, extract text and images from existing PDF documents, perform text search operations on PDF documents and convert PDF pages to images.

EvoPdf Next for .NET runs in 64-bit applications deployed to the .NET on Windows Server platform of AWS Elastic Beanstalk, with IIS 10.0 on Windows Server 2022 or Windows Server 2025, without requiring any installation or prior configuration of the instances.

The library targets .NET Standard 2.0, making it usable in any .NET Core application that supports this standard.

Create a new .NET project in Visual Studio and use the NuGet Package Manager to add a reference to the EvoPdf.Next.Windows NuGet metapackage which will install all the library components.

To install only specific components of the EvoPdf Next library you can add references to the corresponding NuGet packages. You can find more details about the available packages in the Getting Started on Windows documentation section.

After installing the package, add the using EvoPdf.Next; directive at the top of your source files to access the EvoPdf Next API.

Publish the application for Windows:

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -o publish

On this platform an ASP.NET Core application is deployed with a manifest file. Create the application bundle in two steps:

1. Create the site.zip archive with the content of the publish folder at its root. In File Explorer, open the publish folder, select all its content and choose Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder.

2. Create the application bundle, a zip archive with site.zip and the aws-windows-deployment-manifest.json file below at its root.

{
  "manifestVersion": 1,
  "deployments": {
    "aspNetCoreWeb": [
      {
        "name": "evopdf-app",
        "parameters": {
          "appBundle": "site.zip",
          "iisPath": "/",
          "iisWebSite": "Default Web Site"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

The iisPath value installs the application at the root of the web site. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio creates the same bundle when the application is published to Elastic Beanstalk from Visual Studio.

In the Elastic Beanstalk console, choose Create application and create a Web server environment:

• Platform: .NET on Windows Server, with a platform branch such as IIS 10.0 running on 64bit Windows Server 2025.

• Application code: Local file, then choose the application bundle.

• Platform-specific options: keep Enable 32-bit applications disabled. The library runs in 64-bit applications.

• Service access: the service role and the EC2 instance profile of Elastic Beanstalk. The instance profile, usually named aws-elasticbeanstalk-ec2-role, must exist before the first environment is created; if the list is empty, create it in the IAM console with the Elastic Beanstalk - Compute use case.

• Instance types: HTML to PDF conversion can be resource-intensive, depending on the complexity of the content. Windows Server itself uses about 2 GB of memory. The t3.medium instance type (2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM) is the minimum we recommend and t3.large (2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM) or higher is recommended for production workloads.

When the health of the environment is Ok, open the environment URL to run your application. To deploy a new version, choose Upload and deploy on the environment page and select the new application bundle.

You can follow the same steps to publish the EvoPdf Next ASP.NET demo application, from the EvoPdf_Next_AspNetDemo_Windows_net10.0.csproj project, or from the EvoPdf_Next_AspNetDemo_Windows_net8.0.csproj project for a .NET 8 platform.

On the environment page choose Logs > Request logs. The archive contains the deployment log of Elastic Beanstalk and the IIS logs. The errors of the ASP.NET Core application are recorded in the Windows Application event log.

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