How to Setup Amazon EC2 CLI Tools on Linux

Amazon EC2 (AWS) CLI tools (Command Line Tools) wrap the Amazon EC2 API actions. These tools help us to Manage Amazon EC2 services through command line interface. We can also use them inside scripts for task automation like backups, creating snapshots etc.

Install JAVA

The Amazon EC2 command line tools required Java 1.6 or later version. Make sure you have proper java installed on your system. You can install JRE or JDK , both are ok to use.

# java -version 

java version "1.8.0_05"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_05-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 25.5-b02, mixed mode)

If you don’t have Java installed your system, Use below links to install Java on your system first

• Installing JAVA/JDK 8 on CentOS, RHEL and Fedora
• Installing JAVA/JDK 8 on Ubuntu

Download and Setup the CLI Tools

Now download the Amazon API CLI tools using following command and extract them at a proper place. For this example, we are using /opt directory.

# mkdir /opt/ec2
# wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
# unzip ec2-api-tools.zip -d /tmp
# mv /tmp/ec2-api-tools-*  /opt/ec2/tools

Generate AWS AccessKey and SecretKey

Now you are required to generate Access Key and Secret Key in your Amazon account. Get these security keys from aws securityCredentials page. If will prompt to login to your amazon account.

Configure Environment

Now edit any startup script like ~/.bashrc file and add the following commends at end of the file. So that all the default values will load on system bootup.

export EC2_BASE=/opt/ec2
export EC2_HOME=$EC2_BASE/tools
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
export AWS_SECRET_KEY="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
export EC2_URL=https://ec2.xxxxxxx.amazonaws.com
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/opt/jdk1.8.0_05

Set the EC2_URL with your correct url. If you don’t know it, You can get this value from next step. Now execute the following command to set environment variables

$ source ~/.bashrc

Verify EC2 Tools Setup

After completing all configuration, let’s run following command to quickly verify setup.

# ec2-describe-regions --access-key=$AWS_ACCESS_KEY --secret-key=$AWS_SECRET_KEY

REGION  eu-west-1       ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  sa-east-1       ec2.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  us-east-1       ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  ap-northeast-1  ec2.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  us-west-2       ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com
REGION  us-west-1       ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  ap-southeast-1  ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com
REGION  ap-southeast-2  ec2.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com