Tools for generating and bootstrapping EC2 AMIs

When used as described below, the launched instance will download a release or branch of this repository and use it to load a base configuration and save it as an AMI in your AWS account. It will also install a FirstBoot cronjob to execute scripts/global/doFirstBoot on boot of any Instances created from the AMI. Currently FirstBoot only removes itself so it does not run on subsequent reboots.

This allows for automation of installing core tools and dependencies needed in order to spin up application VMs in your EC2 environment. By default, the scripts in this repository are made to update a stock Ubuntu image, install Python 3.0 and pip, Puppet, and AWS command-line tools. It also prepares the AMI for auto-configuration of Images built from it.

When using these scripts to create AMIs, the instance must be granted a role with access to the following actions:

• ec2:CreateImage
• ec2:DescribeImages

Below are two methods for using this repo to bootstrap your EC2 AMIs. For both methods, the instance must be given access to create an image (see the "IAM Role" section above), and it is recommended to set the instance's shutdown behavior to "Terminate" to allow the instance to terminate itself and prevent additonal EC2 charges once the script has finished configuring itself and kicked off the AMI generation.

The complete contents of the UserData script can be pasted into the "User data" section under "Advanced Details" on the "Configure Instance Details" step when launching a new EC2 instance. This also offers the greatest amount of control, allowing the script to be modified to tweek tarball download settings.

The following short script can be used in your instance's "User data" instead of the full UserData script and will download and execute the most recent version of the UserData script automatically and will ensure that the most recent release archive from GitHub is used. The URL can be modified to point to branches or tags other than "master".

#!/bin/bash
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JungleCatSoftware/AWS-Toolkit/master/UserData | /bin/bash