Setup ec2 credentials and tools

Setting up EC2 Credentials and Tools

Credentials

First, we put our private key and a certificate on the instance where we will be creating our AMI. We put them in /tmp so they don't hang around after reboots, or get stuck in an image by accident.

INSTANCE_IP=ec2-xxxxxxxxxxx.amazonaws.com
scp /path/to/certs/*{pk,cert}-*.pem ${INSTANCE_IP}:/tmp

Most of the amazon tools check for the EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and the EC2_CERT environment variables, so let's define those on our instance.

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`ls /tmp/*pk-*.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`ls /tmp/*cert-*.pem`

Tools

First, the amazon tools need unzip, rsync, java and ruby installed.

apt-get update
apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get install -y  unzip openjdk-6-jre ruby libopenssl-ruby rsync

I like to put the amazon api and ami tools in /root/bin, and to make symlinks so that I don't have to keep changing the path.

mkdir -p /root/bin
cd /root/bin

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-{ami,api}-tools.zip

unzip '*.zip'
rm *.zip
ln -s ec2-ami-tools-* ec2-ami-tools.current
ln -s ec2-api-tools-* ec2-api-tools.current

Now we need to tell our environment where these tools are

cat >>/root/.bashrc <<EOF
export EC2_HOME=/root/bin/ec2-api-tools.current
export EC2_AMITOOL_HOME=/root/bin/ec2-ami-tools.current
export PATH=\${PATH}:\${EC2_HOME}/bin:\${EC2_AMITOOL_HOME}/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
EOF

source /root/.bashrc

You should now be ready to go.