I have been playing a lot with Amazon Web Services. For numerous reasons, I principally like to use these key bits of software in the work I do:
Python
lxml
s3cmd
As a consequence, I find myself repeatedly doing the following steps to bring the Amazon Linux up to scratch for what I need. I thought I would document them here, in case anyone else finds these steps useful. But also as an easy way for me to find it again...
To Just Generally Bring the Server Up To Date
sudo yum update
Amongst other things, this brings you to Python 2.6, which is sufficiently up-to-date for what I need. (By the time you or future me reads this, I suppose it might be more up-to-date than that).
Install lxml
lxml is the best library I've found for working with XML in Python. It is compatible with, but offers lots of nice enhancements beyond, the standard elementtree, including better support for XPath and built in support for XSLT processing.
Based on this very handy blog post, I do the following to install lxml
sudo yum install gcc
sudo yum install python26-devel
sudo yum install libxslt
sudo yum install libxslt-devel
sudo yum install libxml2-devel
sudo easy_install libxml
That last step to install libxml can take a few minutes. But the whole thing typically takes perhaps ten minutes.
Install s3cmd
Since I do a lot of work with Amazon s3, it is handy to have a command line interface to list, get and put files to s3 buckets. I tried following the instructions about how to install s3cmd on the site, but it just wouldn't work. So, now I do this and it works like a charm:
sudo yum --enablerepo epel install s3cmd
Python
lxml
s3cmd
As a consequence, I find myself repeatedly doing the following steps to bring the Amazon Linux up to scratch for what I need. I thought I would document them here, in case anyone else finds these steps useful. But also as an easy way for me to find it again...
To Just Generally Bring the Server Up To Date
sudo yum update
Amongst other things, this brings you to Python 2.6, which is sufficiently up-to-date for what I need. (By the time you or future me reads this, I suppose it might be more up-to-date than that).
Install lxml
lxml is the best library I've found for working with XML in Python. It is compatible with, but offers lots of nice enhancements beyond, the standard elementtree, including better support for XPath and built in support for XSLT processing.
Based on this very handy blog post, I do the following to install lxml
sudo yum install gcc
sudo yum install python26-devel
sudo yum install libxslt
sudo yum install libxslt-devel
sudo yum install libxml2-devel
sudo easy_install libxml
That last step to install libxml can take a few minutes. But the whole thing typically takes perhaps ten minutes.
Install s3cmd
Since I do a lot of work with Amazon s3, it is handy to have a command line interface to list, get and put files to s3 buckets. I tried following the instructions about how to install s3cmd on the site, but it just wouldn't work. So, now I do this and it works like a charm:
sudo yum --enablerepo epel install s3cmd
And you can run s3cmd --configure to set up and test out the s3 configuration, if you like.
