Installation

Install with RubyGems

If can install sonic via RubyGems:

gem install sonic-screwdriver

You can also add sonic to your Gemfile in your project if you are working with a ruby project. It is not required for your project to be a ruby project to use sonic.

gem "sonic-screwdriver"

Server Side Dependencies

For a small set of the commands there are server side dependencies.

sonic ecs dependencies

For the sonic ecs commands to work jq is required on the server side. This is covered in the How It Works section.

One way to install jq quickly is by using the sonic execute command. For example:

sonic execute hi-web yum install -y jq

It is recommended that you install jq with the UserData script or bake it into the AMI though.

sonic execute dependencies

The sonic execute works alongside Amazon EC2 Run Command. So it is required to be installed on the servers for sonic execute to work.

Amazon EC2 Run Manager Installation

Installing the EC2 Run Manager agent on your Linux servers is super simple and is only one command.

sudo yum install -y https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm

The full recommended instructions are on the official Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Install SSM Agent documentation.

The trickiest part of installing is likely making sure that the agent on the server has successfully checked into the SSM service. Verify it by tailing /var/log/amazon/ssm/errors/errors.log.

If you are having issues, it is most likely IAM issues. Amazon also provides Configuring Security Roles docs to fix any IAM issues.

You can verify the instances that have successfully checked into SSM with aws ssm describe-instance-information:

aws ssm describe-instance-information --output text --query "InstanceInformationList[*]"

Here’s an example of the output:

$ aws ssm describe-instance-information --output text --query "InstanceInformationList[*]"
2.0.822.0 ip-10-10-41-38  10.10.41.38 i-030033c20c54bf149 True  1497482505.12 Online  Amazon Linux AMI  Linux 2017.03 EC2Instance
2.0.822.0 ip-10-10-110-135  10.10.110.135 i-0f7f833131a51ce35 True  1497482686.53 Online  Amazon Linux AMI  Linu2016.09 EC2Instance
$

More information is provided in the AWS Run Command Walkthrough Using the AWS CLI.

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