This is a fork of Ian McLeod's work that attempts to collect some code that launches Anaconda based installs inside of EBS backed images in EC2. You can see some of his related work on OpenStack:

https://github.com/redhat-openstack/image-building-poc/

I have added a few features to make this more useful to Anaconda testing such as changing the kernel parameters and including an updates.img. I have also dropped Ubuntu-related code since I have no intention of maintaining it for now.

Like Ian's repo this requires the boto EC2 bindings and libguestfs. You must have /etc/boto.cfg correctly configured for this to work, using at least boto version 2.0.

$ yum install python-libguestfs python-boto

$ ./create_disk_image.py --release 18 fedora_18.raw

The install tree URL will be used to extract the kernel and ramdisk needed to bootstrap Anaconda. An updates.img can be used too. These pieces are put into a disk image along with a valid pvgrub menu.lst file. This is all that is needed to launch Anaconda inside of an EC2 instance.

$ ./ami_from_disk_image.py fedora_18.raw

If successful this will return an AMI on a line that looks like this:

Got AMI: ami-beefbeef

This AMI launches Anaconda and looks for a kickstart file at the EC2 user data URL.

NOTE: This AMI can now be used for repeated runs of the next step, provided the OS version and architecture are the same. In the examples so far, x86_64 is assumed by the tools. You could specify an i686 install tree though, and if you did, you would need to make sure your kickstarts were for i686 too.

The next script will launch this AMI, pass the kickstart via user data and then wait for the install to complete and the instance to shut down. Once this is done it will create a new AMI using the create image call from the EC2 API.

$ ./install_on_ec2.py <ami_from_last_step> ./examples/fedora-18-jeos.ks

Once the install instance is running, the script above will report its public DNS address. The F18 example kickstart in this repo contains a "vnc" line to allow you to watch the graphical installer as it is running. To do this, run the following command:

$ vncviewer <public_hostname_from_above>:1

When asked for a password, use the same one embedded in the kickstart files. The VNC session will close when the install is complete and the script will eventually return an AMI. This is the completed image.