The major issue you would face is memory. Yeah, the instance comes with small memory allocation and anything memory intensive task might not work there. Your composer install command might not do anything as well.
The major one would be Composer install just hangs and even aborts the process
When you are issuing
composer install
It will eat a bit of memory and doing it on the instance might not work as expected.
Here are the methods I used to overcome it.
1. Incremental install
On you composer.json file, you can try to list only one or two packages at a time and issue composer update vendor/package and if your individual packages are small enough you might get away with it. In my case this didn’t work
2. Ship your vendor from your local machine to the instance
yeah, just have all your composer install where you will be comforted by memory in Gigabytes and just zip and ship it to your instance.
On your local machine
tar -cf vendor.tar.gz /path/to/vendor/folder
Once you have the tar or zip of any of your favorite compressed file
scp -i /path/to/your/pem/file vendor.tar.gz ec2-user@ec2-domain-goes-here:/path/on/instance
This is assuming this will transfer your vendor file to instance.
Then log into your instance and just uncompress the file and put it on the root directory of your application.
This would be just the half of the work.
Then you will need to generate the bootstrap cache file
composer run-script post-update-cmd
yeah.. this will take care of creating the cache file of the bootstrap along with other stuffs that you put on your composer.json post-update-cmd part.
Sometimes you might want to give the write access to the app/cache and app/logs folders as well
ENjOY