Configuring the AWS CloudFormation CLI Tools for Linux

To prepare the installation directory

1. Open a terminal window. To open a terminal window on Ubuntu Linux:

   1. Open the Ubuntu menu (called Dash home).

   2. In the search box, type term.

   3. Click Terminal to open the terminal window.

   

2. Create the installation directory. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ mkdir ~/.awstools

   This command will create a hidden directory (if it doesn't already exist) called .awstools in your home directory. You can use ~/.awstools as the base directory for all AWS toolsets that you want to install. For now, we'll just concern ourselves with installing the AWS CloudFormation CLI tools.

To install the CLI tools

1. Change your working directory to ~/.awstools. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ cd ~/.awstools

2. Unzip AWSCloudFormation-cli.zip, which you downloaded earlier, in the installation directory. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ unzip ~/Downloads/AWSCloudFormation-cli.zip

   This command will create a subdirectory called AWSCloudFormation-#.#.#, where each # represents part of the version number.

3. (Optional) Link to the installation directory. At the command prompt, type the following, replacing #.#.# with the version number of the downloaded tools, and then press Enter.

   $ ln -s AWSCloudFormation-#.#.# cfn

   For example, to link to version 1.0.11 of the tools, you would type:

   $ ln -s AWSCloudFormation-1.0.11 cfn

   Linking to the installation directory makes it easy to switch to a new version of the tools. It also gives you the ability to easily switch to another version by simply overwriting the link to point to the installation directory of the version you want to use.

To view your AWS access credentials

1. Go to the Amazon Web Services website at http://aws.amazon.com.

2. Click My Account/Console, and then click Security Credentials.

3. Under Your Account, click Security Credentials.

4. In the spaces provided, type your user name and password, and then click Sign in using our secure server.

5. Under Access Credentials, on the Access Keys tab, your access key ID is displayed. To view your secret key, under Secret Access Key, click Show.

To add your AWS credentials to the AWS credential file

1. Open the terminal if you don't have it open already, and change your working directory to the AWS CloudFormation CLI installation directory. For example, if you made a link to your installation directory called cfn as suggested previously, At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ cd ~/.awstools/cfn

2. (Optional) Copy or rename credential-file-path.template For this example, we'll use myAWSCredentials.txt. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ cp credential-file-path.template myAWSCredentials.txt

3. Edit the file with your favorite text editor (both gedit and vi are installed by default on Ubuntu), enter your AWS credentials as shown, and then save and close the file.

   AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
   AWSSecretKey=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

   Note: These are only example values. Enter your own AWS security credentials in the file.

To add the AWS CloudFormation CLI tools environment variables:

1. Edit ~/.bashrc (or the equivalent terminal startup file for your Linux variant) in your favorite editor. If this file does not exist yet, create it.

2. In ~/.bashrc, add the following lines, substituting the appropriate directories on your own computer:

   # AWS CloudFormation CLI tools setup
   export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/default-java/jre/"
   export AWS_CLOUDFORMATION_HOME="$HOME/.awstools/cfn"
   export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE="$AWS_CLOUDFORMATION_HOME/myAWSCredentials.txt"
   export PATH="$PATH:$AWS_CLOUDFORMATION_HOME/bin"

   If you did not add your AWS access keys to an external file (such as the myAWSCredentials.txt file specified earlier), you should not include the AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE environment variable.

   Note

   On Ubuntu Linux, default-java is a link to the default Java installation, which is typically OpenJDK. OpenJDK works fine with the AWS CloudFormation command-line tools. If you prefer a different Java runtime, you can reset default-java to point to your preferred runtime location, or you can set the location of your preferred runtime as the value of JAVA_HOME in ~/.bashrc.

3. To load your environment variables, either quit and restart the terminal or, at the command prompt, At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ source ~/.bashrc

4. Test your installation by running cfn-cmd. At the command prompt, type the following, and then press Enter:

   $ cfn-cmd

   This command will list all of the available AWS CloudFormation CLI commands, their usage, and the available options for cfn-cmd itself (there are two options: help and version).