Amazon EC2 Command Line Tools Installation Guide

Begin by ssh into your EC2 instance.

Create the following directory /opt/tools

mkdir /opt/tools

Download EC2 API tools.

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
unzip ec2-api-tools.zip

Install the latest version of Java. Read Install Java OpenJDK 7 on Amazon EC2 Ubuntu.

Set the EC2_HOME directory in ~/.bashrc

export EC2_HOME=/opt/tools/ec2-api-tools-1.6.7.3
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin

Add the Security Credentials to ~/.bashrc. You can get your security credentials in you AWS console.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=your_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=your_AWS_SECRET_KEY

Try this command:

ec2-describe-regions