Rails app: AWS Elastic Beanstalk app is too large for upload

When I upload my Rails app to Elastic Beanstalk, I get the "ERROR: Source bundle is empty or exceeds maximum allowed size: 524288000.", which isn't surprising since my asset files are very large (mostly images). So, I can host the assets on S3 or Cloudfront CDN, no problem. The problem is that the only way I've found after AWS document reading and google searches to ignore the assets is to remove and ignore them from git - which is a bad situation. In Heroku, my slug was also too large, so I added a .slugignore file to root in order to ignore the assets. Is there a similar approach for Elastic Beanstalk, so I can keep my assets in git and have them not uploaded with my app?