Assumptions

We assume you’ve signed up for EC2. We also assume your machine has a public key setup (commonly ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/id_rsa.pub).

Download Credential Files

First, you need to download some credential files to your machine. Go to the AWS Security Credentials page, click “X.509 Certificates”, create a new certificate if you need to, download the files when prompted, and then put them into your ~/.ec2 directory:

mkdir ~/.ec2
cp ~/Downloads/{cert,pk}-*.pem ~/.ec2

Install the EC2 Command Line Tools

Now let’s install the two packages we need:

brew install ec2-{api,ami}-tools

Copy the following to your ~/.bash_profile:

export JAVA_HOME="$(/usr/libexec/java_home)"
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY="$(/bin/ls "$HOME"/.ec2/pk-*.pem | /usr/bin/head -1)"
export EC2_CERT="$(/bin/ls "$HOME"/.ec2/cert-*.pem | /usr/bin/head -1)"
export EC2_HOME="/usr/local/Library/LinkedKegs/ec2-api-tools/jars"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="..."
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"=..."

Where AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY are available from the “Access Keys” tab on the https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials.

Don’t forget to reload your .bash_profile:

source ~/.bash_profile

Uploading your Access Keys

Some people use the public/private keys that Amazon gives them, but I find it easier to use the same public key on my laptop that I already use for things like Github and servers at work. To upload, you can use this helpful script from Eric Hammond (slightly modified):

keypair=macbook # Choose something that makes sense, like your computer name
publickeyfile=$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Point this to the public key you want to use
regions=$(ec2-describe-regions | cut -f2)

for region in $regions; do
  echo $region
  ec2-import-keypair --region $region --public-key-file $publickeyfile $keypair
done

If you get an error like this, you have to wait a little while until Amazon processes your account:

Client.OptInRequired: You are not subscribed to this service. Please go to http://aws.amazon.com to subscribe.

Test it All Works

Once we’ve done all that, we can test it by doing:

ec2-describe-instances

If you don’t see an error, you’re all set!

Further Reading

Since there are almost 300 commands available to you now, your best bet is to take a look at the EC2 Command Line Reference. One command that you’ll want to memorize is ec2-run-instances, which will spawn a new ec2 instance when you give it an amazon machine image (AMI) id.

References

These links were helpful in getting my machine setup and writing this tutorial:

• Starting Amazon EC2 with Mac OS X
• Uploading Personal ssh Keys to Amazon EC2