Question

I need to:

sudo apt-get install rubygems
sudo gem install <lots of gems>

does the bootstrap action have sudo access?

Answer 1

The answer is yes. You can test your bootstrap script like this:

elastic_mapreduce --create --alive --ssh

This will create a node and give you a ssh connection to it, from which you can test your bootstrap script.

UPDATE: For reference here is what I’m running:

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get -y -V install irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby libruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.11.zip
unzip rubygems-1.8.11.zip
cd rubygems-1.8.11
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo gem1.8 install bson bson_ext json tzinfo i18n activesupport --no-rdoc --no-ri

UPDATE2: to install aws-sdk

#!/bin/bash

# ruby developer packages
sudo apt-get -y -V  install ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8
sudo apt-get -y -V  install libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby
# nokogiri requirements
sudo apt-get -y -V  install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.8.11.zip
unzip rubygems-1.8.11.zip
cd rubygems-1.8.11
sudo ruby setup.rb

sudo gem1.8 install aws-sdk --no-rdoc --no-ri

-y on apt-get makes it not prompt you

I wget rubygems because the version you get with apt-get is way out of date, and some gems won’t build using an old version.