Amazon EC2 CLI Installation

External

• Setting Up the Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface Tools on Linux/Unix and Mac OS X http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/set-up-ec2-cli-linux.html

Internal

• Amazon EC2 CLI

Download

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip

Unzip

cd /opt
unzip .../ec2-api-tools.zip
ln -s ./ec2-api-tools-1.7.5.1 ec2-api-tools

Adjust the command to reflect the actual EC2 API tools version.

Post-Install

Set JAVA_HOME

Set JAVA_HOME for all accounts that are going to use ec2 tools.

Set Environment

For all users that are going to use it, configure the following environment variables in their .bashrc (or equivalent):

export EC2_HOME=/opt/ec2-api-tools
export PATH=${PATH}:${EC2_HOME}/bin

Set the Access Keys

Provision the API access keys for the Amazon IAM user that will use the API. More details about access keys here: Amazon AWS API Access Keys.

Access keys can be specified on command line every time an ec2 command is issued, with:

-aws-access-key or -O
--aws-secret-key or -W 

or by setting the following environment variables:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=your-aws-access-key-id 
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=your-aws-secret-key

In case the Java process that is performing the call does not have access to the environment, the credentials may be specified in .aws/credentials:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=...
aws_secret_access_key=...

For more methods of configuring credentials see:

Test Installation

ec2-describe-regions

Set the Region

export EC2_URL=https://<service_endpoint>  

Example:

export EC2_URL=https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

Note: For some reason, the console always shows by default "Oregon", which corresponds to https://ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com.