p4training

Utilities to work with p4training instances - creation etc.

You must be setup with an AWS account under p4consulting parent. Contact Tom Tyler if you do not have this setup.

Pre-requisites

Please ensure you have the AWS CLI installed

Having logged in to the AWS console, click on your username > My Security Credentials. You need to have created and saved an "Access Key for CLI, SDK and API access"

You need to make sure you have your AWS credentials also installed

The above suggests running the following, together with information from your Access Key:

aws configure

For now, AMI and instances are published in the eu-west-1 region (Ireland) - so specify that along with the other

The following command should run successfully after you have installed AWS CLI:

aws ec2 describe-instances

Download p4training

Check the releases tab for the project and download the latest executable for your operating system.

Execute help:

 ./p4training -h
usage: p4training --email=EMAIL --shortcode=SHORTCODE [<flags>]

Flags:
  -h, --help                 Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
  -u, --username=USERNAME    Username to create for (defaults to email if not specified)
  -e, --email=EMAIL          Users email
  -s, --shortcode=SHORTCODE  Shortcode for course
  -i, --instance=INSTANCE    AMI instance ID to use (note these vary per region and per OS type). Defaults Windows (ami-099c3bc9f4d739cae), Linux
                             (ami-07f014eead871d2d6)
  -l, --linux                Create Linux VM (otherwise Windows by default)
      --version              Show application version.

To create an AWS instance for a particular user (first is Windows, second Linux):

./p4training -s SOME-COURSE -e fred@example.com -u "Fred Bloggs"
./p4training -s SOME-COURSE --linux -e jim@example.com

Note that you only need to quote arguments when they have spaces in them - such as username above.

These will create EC2 instances with a names SOME-COURSE#fred@example.com with tag showing username and SOME-COURSE#joe@example.com

It is easy to wrap the above in a Bash or Windows to create multiple users. E.g.

echo "fred@example.com,Fred Bloggs" >> users.csv
echo "jim@example.com,Jim Jones" >> users.csv

cat users.csv | while IFS="," read -e email user; do ./p4training -s "MY-COURSE" -u "$user" -e "$email"; done

Finding created instances

This command will find all instances with tag value of "MY-COURSE" as specified in shortcode above:

aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=tag-value,Values=MY-COURSE --query "Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,PublicIpAddress,Tags[*]]" --output text > instances.txt

It is then easy to parse out the results, for example:

grep -E "^i\-|Username" instances.txt | paste - - | awk '{print $4, $2}'