I’ve probably deployed applications thousands of times with Elasticbeanstalk. But recently I came across a really strange error:
ERROR: InvalidParameterValueError - Invalid unicode xml character in CreateApplicationVersionMessage.Description at index 53
I switched from my feature branch back to master and eb deploy‘d and it worked as expected.
I thought maybe my feature branch name was the problem, so I git checkout -b feature/new-name to try to see if there were special characters causing the issue but no luck.
The Fix
Some report that deleting your Application Versions in the ElasticBeanstalk console will do the trick. I deleted all Application Versions and I was still not able to deploy it.
What worked for me was to utilize the --message= option in the eb deploy command.
So utilize this to override the autogenerated CreateApplicationVersionMessage.Description during the vanill eb deploy command:
eb deploy --message="test"
Now "test" overrides the problem autogenerated vaue and it fixed the issue for me. Happy building.