Prerequisites

Topics

This document assumes that the reader is comfortable working in a Linux environment. In addition, access to an SSH client and an installation of a Java 5 compatible Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is required. For more information, refer to the following sections.

As a convention, all command line text will be prefixed with PROMPT> . The actual command line prompt on your machine is likely to be different. We also use $ to indicate a Linux specific command and C:\> for a Windows specific command. While we don't currently provide explicit instructions, the tools also work correctly on Mac OS X (the commands will more resemble the Linux commands provided). The example output resulting from the command is shown immediately thereafter without any prefix.

	Note
	If you are using Cygwin, EC2_HOME, EC2_PRIVATE_KEY, and EC2_CERT must use UNIX paths (JAVA_HOME should have a Windows path.) Also, the value of EC2_HOME cannot contain any spaces, even if the value is quoted or the spaces are escaped.

SSH Clients

For some of the examples illustrated in this guide you'll need access to an SSH client. Most Linux/Unix installations include an SSH client by default. If yours does not, the OpenSSH project provides a free implementation of the full suite of SSH tools. For more information, go to the OpenSSH home page.

Windows users can download and install PuTTY, a free SSH client. To download the client and installation instructions, go to the PuTTY home page. For information on how to use PuTTY with Amazon EC2, see Appendix: PuTTY.

The Java Runtime Environment

The command line tools used in this guide require Java version 5 or later to run. Either a JRE or JDK installation is acceptable. To view and download JREs for a range of platforms, including Linux and Windows, go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/.

The command line tools depend on an environment variable (JAVA_HOME) to locate the Java runtime. This environment variable should be set to the full path of the directory that contains a sub-directory named bin which in turn contains the java (on Linux/Unix) or the java.exe (on Windows) executable. You might want to simplify things by adding this directory to your path before other versions of Java.

Following is an example of how to set this environment variable in Linux or Unix.

$ export JAVA_HOME=<PATH>

Following is an example of the syntax in Windows.

C:\> set JAVA_HOME=<PATH>

You can confirm this by running $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version and checking the output.

$ $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version
java version "1.5.0_09"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_09-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_09-b03, mixed mode, sharing)

The syntax is different on Windows, but the output is similar.

C:\> %JAVA_HOME%\bin\java -version
java version "1.5.0_09"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_09-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_09-b03, mixed mode, sharing)