Knife EC2 plugin

Let's continue our community plugin exploration with the knife EC2 plugin. This plugin is used to integrate knife with Amazon cloud instances that allow you to create and manage instances from the command line.

Installing the Knife EC2 plugin

Much like installing the knife Windows plugin, the installation process for the knife EC2 plugin is super easy. The Chef command-line tool comes to our aid once again. Simply issue the following command:

chef gem install knife-ec2

Your installation will be done in a few seconds. You might note that there is a dependent gem installed; it is the fog-aws gem, which the EC2 plugin uses.

Unlike the knife Windows plugin, after the plugin is installed, there is still more to configure to be able to use it. The knife EC2 plugin requires some specific data related to your Amazon account. There are several ways to make the Amazon data available to the EC2 plugin. The data can be used via environment variables, or as knife.rb configuration settings...