chxo internets

Installing EC2 AMI bundling tools in Debian

I recently rebundled my EC2 Debian image and, unlike the first time when I bundled from an existing public image, this time I wanted to do it from within my own image. (See the EC2 Getting Started Guide for background and howto.)

In order to do this, you need to install the AMI Bundling Tools, which Amazon helpfully (not!) provides in an RPM format. Despite rumors to the contrary, you don’t need to install alien to install this rpm.

1. Install necessary software (this is what I needed, you made need more depending on what packages you already have)
   

   apt-get install ruby libopenssl-ruby curl rpm

2. Create a symlink for site_ruby in /usr/lib
   

   cd /usr/lib
   ln -s /usr/local/lib/site_ruby

3. Download and install the rpm
   

   wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm
   rpm -i --nodeps ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm

Once you do this, you should be able to run ec2-bundle-vol and bundle that fine image of yours!

Update: I had to modify the stock ec2-bundle-vol tool to also include /dev when creating the image. It took the better part of an afternoon to figure out why my images weren’t starting up properly.