# Basic AWS Setup

## Get an AWS Account

If you don't already have an AWS account, you can [sign up for one for free at aws.amazon.com](https://aws.amazon.com/).

## Install the AWS Command Line Interface

To install the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), do the following:

```
pip install awscli
```

## Create an AWS Access Key

Next, you will need AWS access keys (access key ID and secret access key). If you don’t have those, see [the AWS documentation about access keys](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-sec-cred-types.html#access-keys-and-secret-access-keys).

You should also pick a default AWS region name (e.g. `eu-central-1`). The AWS documentation has [a list of them](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#ec2_region).

Once you’ve got your AWS access key and you’ve picked a default AWS region name, go to a terminal session and enter:

```
aws configure
```

and answer the four questions. For example:

```
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: eu-central-1
Default output format [None]: [Press Enter]
```

This writes two files: `~/.aws/credentials` and `~/.aws/config`. AWS tools and packages look for those files.

## Generate an RSA Key Pair for SSH

Eventually, you’ll have one or more instances (virtual machines) running on AWS and want to SSH to them. To do that, you need a public/private key pair. The public key will be sent to AWS; you can tell AWS to put it in any instances you provision there. You will keep the private key on your local workstation.

See the appendix [page about how to generate a key pair for SSH](https://docs.planetmint.io/en/latest/appendices/generate-key-pair-for-ssh.html).

## Send the Public Key to AWS

To send the public key to AWS, use the AWS Command Line Interface:

```
aws ec2 import-key-pair \
--key-name "<key-name>" \
--public-key-material file://~/.ssh/<key-name>.pub
```

If you're curious why there's a `file://` in front of the path to the public key, see issue [aws/aws-cli#41 on GitHub](https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/41).

If you want to verify that your key pair was imported by AWS, go to [the Amazon EC2 console](https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home), select the region you gave above when you did `aws configure` (e.g. eu-central-1), click on **Key Pairs** in the left sidebar, and check that `<key-name>` is listed.