Setting up EC2 Command Line environment on Windows

This post assumes that you have setup your EC2 account successfully using Amazon Management Console , to obtain Private Key and X502 Certificate. If you are not sure what this mean , just read the other post on getting started with EC2

To setup windows environment for development with Amazon Cloud Computing platform , EC2. We need to follow below steps

1. Download the command line tools
2. Setting Up Environment variables and path
3. Test it

Download

• Download latest version of JDK from Oracle website
• Download the latest version of EC2 API tools from Amazon Website

Environment Variables

Set the following environment variables

JAVA_HOME as location to your jdk installation folder (e.g C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_25 )

EC2_HOME as location where you unzipped the EC2 API tools ( e.g D:\Development\Tools\ec2-api-tools-1.4.3.0)

EC2_PRIVATE_KEY as location where you stored your private key including name of private key ( e.g D:\Development\Importantcloudfiles\pk.myprivatekey.pem )

EC2_CERT as as location where you stored your cert key including name of cert key (e.g D:\Development\Importantcloudfiles\cert.mycertkey.pem )

Add following information to path variable after the last information present in path variable

;%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%EC2_HOME%\bin

Testing

Open the command prompt and browse to bin folder in EC2 API tools folder

Test by entering following command

ec2-describe-regions

It should show output as below