Installing Amazon EC2 tools to Debian Lenny

I was reading through Bill Childers excellent article in Linux Journal on running Ubuntu under EC2 and I thought I add my notes on how to make the client tools run on Debian.

First, install the Sun JDK (see my previous post on how to do that).

With that done, download the tools from this page:

AWS Developer Community

Or simply by using this link:

ec2-api-tools.zip

Next, unzip them.

Then create a configuration file to export the proper environment variables when your shell fires up:

$ vi ~/.ec2.conf
Add the lines:

export EC2_CERT=whereveryourx509lives/cert-whatever-x509.pem
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=whereveryourx509pklives/pk-whatever-x509.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre
export EC2_HOME=whereveryourec2toolswererunzipped

Save it.

Now add this to the bottom of your .bashrc:

. ~/.ec2.conf
Start a new shell and test for the var's using:

$ export | grep EC2
if they're there, you're all set.

Now test by cd'ing into your ec2 tools bin folder and running:

ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon
If you get a huge java stack trace, changes are your jdk isn't installed properly.

Otherwise, you should get a very long list of all the amazon AMI's available to run from.