I didn’t even realize there’s a set of command line tools for working with Amazon’s Web Services.  It only took a few mins to get started, but it wasn’t immediately apparent what needed to happen.

I’m using OSX Lion.  If you’re using another *nix this is all fairly easy to translate. I have no idea how this could be Windows-ified…

Download and Install

I downloaded the tools as a zip archive from http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/351.  I like to keep this kind of package within a ~/local folder, so:

mkdir ~/local
cd Downloads
unzip ec2-api-tools.zip
mv ec2-api-tools-1.5.3.1 ~/local

To make upgrades easier, create a symlink to that directory:

cd ~/local
ln -s ec2-api-tools-1.5.3.1 ec2-api-tools

Security

You need your username and password to get into the AWS web interface.  You’ll still need to authenticate with the command line tools, but you have a more convenient mechanism to do this – X.509 keys.

Log into the AWS web page, and go to My Account > Security Credentials.  Go to the X.509 Certificates tab and hit Create A New Certificate.  Download the private key and the certificate and save them somewhere safe – since it already has appropriate permissions and contains keys, I save mine to ~/.ssh/pk.pem and ~/.ssh/cert.pem respectively.

Configure

The tools require you to set JAVA_HOME and EC2_HOME environment variables, and there are a couple of other variables that will save you a whole lot of typing. Add the following to the end your ~/.bash_profile:

export PATH=$HOME/local/ec2-api-tools/bin:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
export EC2_HOME=$HOME/local/ec2-api-tools
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ssh/pk_ec2.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ssh/cert_ec2.pem
export EC2_URL=https://ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com

Be careful with the last of these.  I host my instances in the US-West-1 region – you will likely need to figure out which URL to put here based on the region your instances or volumes are at.  If you have machines in multiple regions, use the --region switch in the commands instead.

Source the file to have the changes take effect:

. ~/.bash_profile

and carry on.

Run

Now, it’s easy.  For example, run ec2-describe-instances – it should show you a list of all your EC2 instances, and a whole bunch of info about them.  I leave it to you to work out the other 280-odd commands.  Looks like you can do pretty much do any operation to manage EC2 instances, images, volumes, networking, snapshots, …