By this time you may realize who important is cloud computing. To become cloud expert as a system administrator we should know some programming to automate cloud instances creation. When we say cloud the first thing comes to our mind is Amazon AWS cloud. There is a funny and interesting point how AWS cloud all started in 2006. In this post we will see how to install and configure boto module of python which acts as an API(Application program interface).

Installing Python boto in Linux

Step 1: Install python, python-dev, python-pip applications if they are not installed as these packages are required for boto instalation

Installing boto on Redhat based machines(Centos/Fedora):

	yum install -y python python-dev python-pip

Installing boto on Debian based machines(Ubuntu):

	apt-get install -y python python-dev python-pip

Step2​: Once the above packages are installed, install boto by using pip which is a python module installer

	pip install boto

Configuring Python boto in Linux

As boto is an API tool, we have to configure it to access AWS or openstack as a user. So we have to specify AWS user credentials in a boto understandable way. In order to access AWS through boto we should have AWS access key and secret key which need to be copied to ~/.boto file

Getting AWS access key and Secret key 

Step3: Login to your aws console and follow below screenshots to get your AWS access key and secret key.

 

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Once we get Access key ID and secure access key from above details write those details to .boto file. 

Step4: Write your keys to ~/.boto file as shown below

	[Credentials]

	aws_access_key_id = AKIAJTKAWVR5TELVR4VA

	aws_secret_access_key = wir9eklBfm8HQbDIlkxfIkOOpRb3VJ7mGFgVgu4a

We can add some other boto settings to this file like EC2 region  and http socket time outs which are good to have but not mandatory. My settings as follows.

	[Boto]

	ec2_region_name = ap-southeast-2

	http_socket_timeout = 10


Step5: Change permissions to your .boto files so that only you can read the file.

	chmod 400 ~/.boto

That is it we are done with setting up our boto module. We can start coding AWS using this. Some example to test if we are able to access AWS or not.

List available regions

	$ python

	Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 

	[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2

	Type "help", "copyright", "credit's" or "license" for more information.

	>>> import boto.ec2

	>>> boto.ec2.regions()

	[RegionInfo:us-east-1, RegionInfo:cn-north-1, RegionInfo:ap-northeast-1, RegionInfo:eu-west-1, RegionInfo:ap-southeast-1, RegionInfo:ap-southeast-2, RegionInfo:us-west-2, RegionInfo:us-gov-west-1, RegionInfo:us-west-1, RegionInfo:eu-central-1, RegionInfo:sa-east-1]

Hope this helps some one to setup boto stuff on their machine.

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.