AWS setting up command line tools in Cygwin

I use the amazon command line tools a lot, its often a quicker way to accomplish things quickly versus the AWS web interface,  though the AWS web interface has gotten a lot better over the past few years)

In this guide I am going to show how to set up the command lines tools using Cygwin, I have another (slightly different guide for Ubuntu)

This guide of course assumes you already have an Amazon AWS account.

Cygwin AWS setup

First you need a place to put all the keys you will use from AWS.    These keys will be referenced by your program

Open up Cygwin and from the home directory create a “.ec2” folder .

> mkdir ~/.ec2

Get the keys setup

Now get some keys to put in there.

Open up http://aws.amazon.com/

Click on My Account/Console  ->  Security Credentials

Sign in using your username/password

Scroll down to the “Access Credentials” and select the X.509 Certificates and click Create a new Certificate.

Click on Download Private Key File and save the file to the .ec2 folder

Then click on the “Download X.509 Certificate” button and save the certificate to the .ec2 folder

Now log into AWS Management Console

Open up http://aws.amazon.com [1]

Click on My Account/Console -> AWS Management Console

Click on EC2

Click on Key Pairs under the “Network & Security”

Click on Create Key Pair

Give it a name and click create.

A prompt to save this file will appear, save it to the .ec2 directory

Install Command line tools

Open http://aws.amazon.com/developertools [2]

And do a quick search for command-line. 

 

Here is a EC2 command line tool.  You will see that there are different command line tools for different AWS services  (EC2, RDS, etc)  For now just get the EC2 command line tool

This is the main EC2 command line API tool to look for.

It is located at

http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/351

Click on Download the Amazon EC2 API tools from Amazon S3

Create a folder in your home directory named ec2-api-tools

>  cd        >  mkdir ec2-api-tools

Now unzip the downloaded command line tools into this directory

>  cd ~/ec2-api-tools        >  unzip /cygdrive/c/Users/patman/Downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip        >  mv ec2-api-tools-1.6.4/* .        >  rm -r ec2-api-tools-1.6.4        >  ls -alh

This should put a bin and a lib folder

Edit .bashrc

Edit .bashrc

>    cd        >    vi .bashrc

Add the following to the end of the file   

export EC2_HOME=$HOME/ec2-api-tools export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$HOME/.ec2/pk-XXXXX.pem export EC2_CERT=$HOME/.ec2/cert-XXXXX.pem export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin export JAVA_HOME=/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/java

If your "default" region is not going to be the east coast you can set your default region in your bash file

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

This would be for the Oregon (us-west-2) region

Now run source

>  source .bashrc

You may need to close and reopone the Cygwin window as source does not seem to work, at least for me.

Now attempt to run this command

>  ec2-describe-keypairs

If you want to check a different region than your default region use the --region flag

> ec2-describe-keypairs --region us-west-2

You may get an error like this

If this is the case then within Cygwin run the following commands

(assuming you have Java installed on your machine)

>  mkdir -p /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/java/bin        >  cp /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/java.exe /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/java/bin/

Now rerun the command.

This will list your keypairs

(I whited my actual numbers out J )

References

[1]  Amazon Web Services 

       http://aws.amazon.com

       Visited 10/2012

[2] AWS Developer Tools 

       http://aws.amazon.com/developertools

       Visited 10/2012