AWS Elastic Beanstalk: invalid YAML or JSON error when uploading zip file from MAC OS

If you’re doing the Amazon AWS workshop LAB:
github.com/awslabs/eb-node-express-signup

ie. Upload and Deploying your Elastic Beanstalk app

and getting this **PROBLEM** error:

*ERROR Failed to deploy application.

*ERROR The configuration file __MACOSX/.ebextensions/._setup.config in application version 1.1.0 contains invalid YAML or JSON. YAML exception: Invalid Yaml: unacceptable character ‘&#0;’ (0x0) special characters are not allowed in “<reader>”, position 0, JSON exception: Invalid JSON: Unexpected character (&#0;) at position 0.. Update the configuration file.

*INFO Environment update is starting.

**SOLUTION**

This is because MACOS includes some extra hidden folders which you need to exclude from your ZIP file. To do this, run this command in terminal on your zip:

$ zip -d nameofyourzipfile.zip __MACOSX/\*

Now re-upload, and you should get a success message:

INFO Environment update completed successfully.
INFO New application version was deployed to running EC2 instances.

Hope this solved your issue!