Installs and Configs

Before we begin coding, there are a few things we need to install, update, and configure in the Cloud9 environment.

Installing and updating

In the Cloud9 terminal, run the following commands to install and update some software we’ll be using for this workshop:

# Update the AWS CLI
pip install --user --upgrade awscli
These commands will take a few minutes to finish.

Configuring a default region

A best practice is to deploy your infrastructure close to your customers, let’s configure a default AWS region for this workshop : Northern Virginia (*us-east-1*) for North America or Ireland (*eu-west-1*) for Europe.

Create an AWS config file, run:

cat <<END > ~/.aws/config
[default]
region=us-east-1
END
cat <<END > ~/.aws/config
[default]
region=eu-west-1
END

Create an EC2 KeyPair

Creating an SSH KeyPair will allow us to connect to other EC2 instances from our cloud9 machine.

Let’s run this command in our terminal:

aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name workshop --query 'KeyMaterial' --output text > workshop.pem

That will create a new private key on our machine, in workshop.pem, and a public key for EC2 to manage. For security reasons we’ll change the permissions on the workshop.pem file so that only we can read it.

chmod 400 workshop.pem

Now we can start an ssh-agent running the background that can manage our keys and connections for us.

eval `ssh-agent -s`
ssh-add workshop.pem

If it asks for a passphrase you can include one or leave it blank and just press enter.