Setting Up Amazon Linux Development Environment

2026-01-28

Overview

These steps setup a development environment for SlideRule. The target platform is a Graviton3 processor running Amazon Linux 2023 in AWS.

Steps

1. Logging in the first time

ssh -i .ssh/<mykey>.pem ec2-user@<ip address>
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

2. Creating Users

sudo useradd -m -s /usr/bin/bash <username>
sudo passwd <username>
sudo usermod -aG wheel <username>
su - <username>

3. Setup Bash

Replace the appropriate section in the .bashrc file with the contents below

parse_git_branch() {
     git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}
PS1="\n\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]\[\033[33m\] [\$CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV]\$(parse_git_branch):\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\n\$ "

Setup core dumps by adding the following to the end of the .bashrc file

ulimit -c unlimited

4. Managing Keys for Remote Login

create a local key on your laptop or desktop for remote use: ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"
your new key is located in .ssh/id_rsa.pub
to log into a remote server with this key, while on the remote server copy and paste the key into the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

5. Managing Keys for GitHub

create a key on the server, while logged into your account: ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"
add the key as an ssh key to your github account

6. Install and Configure Git

sudo dnf install git

Create the local file ~/.gitconfig in the user’s home directory with the following contents:

[user]
	name = <name>
	email = <email>

[push]
    default = simple

[diff]
    tool = vimdiff

[merge]
    tool = vimdiff

[difftool]
    prompt = false

[mergetool]
    keepBackup = false

[difftool "vimdiff"]
    cmd = vimdiff "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

[alias]
    dd = difftool --dir-diff

[credential "https://github.com"]
	helper =
	helper = !/usr/bin/gh auth git-credential

[credential "https://gist.github.com"]
	helper =
	helper = !/usr/bin/gh auth git-credential

7. Clone Repository

mkdir meta
cd meta
git clone git@github.com:SlideRuleEarth/sliderule.git

Install the pre-commit hooks

cd sliderule
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

8. Installing and Configuring Docker

sudo dnf install docker
sudo usermod -aG docker <username>
newgrp docker

Then install Docker Compose plugin

DOCKER_CONFIG=${DOCKER_CONFIG:-$HOME/.docker}
mkdir -p $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins
curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.23.3/docker-compose-linux-aarch64 -o $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose
chmod +x $DOCKER_CONFIG/cli-plugins/docker-compose

9. Install Dependencies got Local Build

Navigate to targets/slideruleearth/docker/sliderule/Dockerfile.buildenv file and follow the same steps in that file to recreate the full development environment on your local machine.

10. Install and Configure Miniconda

wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-py39_4.12.0-Linux-aarch64.sh
chmod +x Miniconda3-py39_4.12.0-Linux-aarch64.sh
./Miniconda3-py39_4.12.0-Linux-aarch64.sh
conda config --set changeps1 False
conda config --set auto_activate_base false

Once you have miniconda setup, you can navigate to the sliderule-python repository and run conda env create -f environment.yml to create a sliderule_env environment with everything you will need for the SlideRule Python client.

11. Install GitHub Command Line Client

sudo dnf install 'dnf-command(config-manager)'
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://cli.github.com/packages/rpm/gh-cli.repo
sudo dnf install gh

12. Install and Configure AWS Command Line Client

sudo dnf install awscli

Single Sign On

Run the following commands the first time to setup your machine:

aws configure sso --profile <profile> --use-device-code

Then to login:

mv ~/.hidden_aws ~/.aws || true
unset AWS_PROFILE
aws sso login --profile <profile> --use-device-code
aws ecr get-login-password --region us-west-2 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin 742127912612.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com
eval $(aws configure export-credentials --profile <profile> --format env)
export AWS_PROFILE=<profile>

And to logout (which is very useful for running as IAM role assigned to the instance):

mv ~/.aws ~/.hidden_aws || true
unset AWS_PROFILE

2-Factor Authentication

Make sure to setup an initial .aws/credentials file so that it has the sliderule profile access key and secret access key. The credentials file will look something like:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = _
aws_secret_access_key = _
aws_session_token = _

[sliderule]
aws_access_key_id = _
aws_secret_access_key = _

To populate the default keys and session token, run:

aws --profile=sliderule sts get-session-token --serial-number arn:aws:iam::$account_number:mfa/$user_name --token-code=$code

To login to the AWS Elastic Container Registry, run:

aws ecr get-login-password --region $region | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin $account_number.dkr.ecr.$region.amazonaws.com