Wordpress on AWS, how to update only a theme
I'm not terribly familiar with elastic beanstalk, so I'm not sure if my method is at all approachable with your workflow, but I have a similar (non-AWS) workflow, and I can share how I do it.



I've managed to only push theme changes by separating the deployment of wordpress, and its mysql DB (both as a docker containers, in my case), and the deployment of the themes (which is a git repo).

This way I can separate/automate the deployment of wordpress, mysql, and my wordpress theme in a fairly loosely coupled manner.

Updating consists of only performing a git pull to the themes directory -- No other wordpress/mysql interaction occurs, so my plugins stay in whatever state they were previously in prior to the theme update.