How to configure Amazon EC2 command line interface

Question

I want to install Amazon Ec2 cli tools on a linux machine. I have configured java and have installed ec2 cli tools but I am getting the following error:

[root@ip-/]# ec2-describe-regions | sort
Required option '-O, --aws-access-key KEY' missing (-h for usage)

Also please tell me how to set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY, EC2_CERT parameters. How to resolve this.

Answer 1

Ec2 cli tools are old and are not maintained by AWS anymore. Use aws-cli instead. Refer this link which details how to set-up and configure aws-cli.

using aws-cli, its a one time installation which support almost all the AWS Services. with older CLI tools, you had to configure CLI for each and every service separately.

also aws-cli provides output in JSON format, hence it is extremely easy to parse output. This feature was missing from all the older CLI tools and parsing the output was the most painful task.

Also older CLI tools were java dependent, whereas aws-cli works on python and in my experience, I have found its comparatively faster than the older cli tools.

Answer 2

You can use this command to create EC2 instance.
aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-id --key-name yourkeyname --instance-type t2.micro --region us-east-1 --subnet-id your-subnet-id --count 1