How to create an EC2 AMI

The easiest way to create an EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is to select one of the publicly available AMIs which suits your requirement. Let's say you selected an Ubuntu image, ami-0757b26e. If you don't have an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, first create one. Also you will need to download the EC2 command line tools & then set them up. For instructions on how to setup the EC2 tools, read this.

Follw these step to create your AMI:

0. Generate a keypair if you have not already done so
e.g. ec2-add-keypair key1
The output will be something like the following:

KEYPAIR key1
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Copy the string starting from -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- up to -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY----- and save it in your keys directory, say in the /home/azeez/.ec2/keys/id_key1 file. Make sure that only the owner can read & write to that file.
i.e. chmod 600 /home/azeez/.ec2/keys/id_key1

1. Launch an instance of ami-0757b26e, providing a key, say key1, which you generated in step 0
ec2-run-instances ami-0757b26e -k key1
or you could use the ElasticFox GUI to do the same thing
The output will be something similar to
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RESERVATION r-d5825cbc 610968236798 default
INSTANCE i-5c7dd335 ami-0757b26e pending key1 0 m1.small 2008-10-20T03:25:27+0000 us-east-1b aki-a71cf9ce ari-a51cf9cc
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. Connect to that instance using SSH,
e.g. ssh -i /home/azeez/.ec2/keys/id_key1 root@ec2-67-202-60-248.compute-1.amazonaws.com

3. Make the necessary changes to that instance. For example, you may install some custom software on that instance.

4. Upload your Amazon Web Services (AWS) private key (PK) & certificate (CERT) files to that instance. You can use scp to do this.
scp -i /home/azeez/.ec2/keys/id_key1 pk-XXX.pem cert-xxx.pem root@ec2-75-101-215-95.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/mnt/

5. On that instance, create an image of the current setup.
ec2-bundle-vol -k /mnt/pk-xxx.pem -c /mnt/cert-xxx.pem -u [user-id] -d /mnt

pk-xxx.pem = the PK file you uploaded in step 4
cert-xxx.pem = the CERT file you uploaded in step 4.
user-id = Your AWS User ID

In this step, you may wish to exclude some directories from the new image. Use the -e option followed by the ABSOLUTE path of the directories to be excluded. By default, some directories, like /mnt/, are excluded during image creation.

6. Create a bucket in Amazon S3. You can use s3fox to do this using a GUI, or use the command line tooling.

7. Upload the newly created image to your S3 bucket which was created in step 6
ec2-upload-bundle -b [your-s3-bucket] -m /mnt/image.manifest.xml -a [aws-access-key-id] -s [aws-secret-access-key-id]
aws-access-key-id = your AWS access key
aws-secret-access-key-id = your AWS secret access key.

8. Register the image. On your local machine, run
ec2-register [your-s3-bucket]/image.manifest.xml
The AMI ID will be displayed if the image was successfully registered. Say this was ami-af34d0c6

9. Test your image. Launch an instance of your new image. On your local machine run, e.g.
ec2-run-instances ami-af34d0c6 -k key1
or you could use the ElasticFox GUI to do the same thing

10. Connect to your new instance using SSH. This is similar to step 2.

That's it. You have just created your own AMI.

If you would like to make your AMI public, do the following:
1. ec2-modify-image-attribute --launch-permission -a all
2. Check the launch permissions of an AMI
ec2-describe-image-attribute -l
ami_id= the ID of the AMI