Setting up EC2 Command Line Tools (API Tools)

Download the latest version of EC2 API from AWS website and unzip. All APIs are under the bin. Setting up the $EC_HOME It's better to add this directory to your $PATH. Here is how:

export EC2_HOME=/Users/yasemin/My-Apps/ec2-api-tools
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin

Next is setting up the credentials for the aws account. Create & download a private key and the corresponding certificate from the account's "security credentials" page and link these files to EC2 CLI. Here is how:

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/Users/yasemin/My-Apps/ec2-api-tools/credentilas/pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem 
export EC2_CERT=/Users/yasemin/My-Apps/ec2-api-tools/credentilas/cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem  

This is all - you should be good to go!
Notes:
- If the export commands are appended to ~/.bashrc file, then they will be executed automatically with every new bash session - which is nice to have.
- For detailed setup instruction, please see the official docs. - Make sure $JAVA_HOME is also set. Use '$ which java' to figure out the current path.