Bundling A Custom AMI

Notice that when using a public AMI, you must spawn it using a keypair so you can access it. To read more about keypairs, check out our other tutorial. Once the instance has become available, ssh into it (Windows users check our article on using Putty and EC2).

ssh root@ec2-72-44-61-6.compute-1.amazonaws.com -i ~/.ssh/id-cloud-carpenters

Once logged in, make like a sysadmin and get to apting - or rather, apt to getting. You get the idea.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install git-core apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-python

Now that your instance is awesome, you need to bundle it. The Alestic AMIs come with the AMI tools already installed so there’s no need to download them. In order to bundle a image, you will need your private key and certificate issued by Amazon. You can find them on http://aws.amazon.com under “Your Account” and then “Access Identifiers”. When you are first prompted to generate a certificate file, you should recieve the cert-yourcert.pem and pk-yourpk.pem files. Again, this tutorial is assuming you have a basic knowledge of EC2 which includes this account identification stuff. If you’re having trouble with this, try the unofficial IRC channel (##aws), or read Amazon’s getting started guide. Once you have the private key and certificate files on the instance, start the bundle.

ec2-bundle-vol -c /root/.ec2/cert-yourcert.pem -k /root/.ec2/pk-yourpk.pem -d /mnt -u 0123456678901 -e /root/.ec2

Personally, I’ve found Elasticfox to be somewhat flaky in this department, so I typically will use the command line tools. Note: If you register an existing image manifest, it will override any previous AMI that used that manifest. Sometimes this is the desired functionality, sometimes not. If you need to do versioning with your images I would recommend a naming scheme like: my-lamp-image-0.1, my-lamp-image-0.2, etc.

Once the image is registered, launch it log in and make sure you didn’t leave anything important lying around - you know, like you certificate/private keyxt, your SSN, incriminating photos, etc.

You now have you’re very own AMI!

Notice that when using a public AMI, you must spawn it using a keypair so you can access it. To read more about keypairs, check out our other tutorial. Once the instance has become available, ssh into it (Windows users check our article on using Putty and EC2).

ssh root@ec2-72-44-61-6.compute-1.amazonaws.com -i ~/.ssh/id-cloud-carpenters

Once logged in, make like a sysadmin and get to apting - or rather, apt to getting. You get the idea.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install git-core apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-python

Now that your instance is awesome, you need to bundle it. The Alestic AMIs come with the AMI tools already installed so there’s no need to download them. In order to bundle a image, you will need your private key and certificate issued by Amazon. You can find them on http://aws.amazon.com under “Your Account” and then “Access Identifiers”. When you are first prompted to generate a certificate file, you should recieve the cert-yourcert.pem and pk-yourpk.pem files. Again, this tutorial is assuming you have a basic knowledge of EC2 which includes this account identification stuff. If you’re having trouble with this, try the unofficial IRC channel (##aws), or read Amazon’s getting started guide. Once you have the private key and certificate files on the instance, start the bundle.

ec2-bundle-vol -c /root/.ec2/cert-yourcert.pem -k /root/.ec2/pk-yourpk.pem -d /mnt -u 0123456678901 -e /root/.ec2

Personally, I’ve found Elasticfox to be somewhat flaky in this department, so I typically will use the command line tools. Note: If you register an existing image manifest, it will override any previous AMI that used that manifest. Sometimes this is the desired functionality, sometimes not. If you need to do versioning with your images I would recommend a naming scheme like: my-lamp-image-0.1, my-lamp-image-0.2, etc.

Once the image is registered, launch it log in and make sure you didn’t leave anything important lying around - you know, like you certificate/private keyxt, your SSN, incriminating photos, etc.

You now have you’re very own AMI!