Using Django and Tastypie, we automagically respond to SNS subscription requests. After that part is handled, the notification messages start coming in and those are used to trigger an SQS polling cycle (trying to do a thorough job there which may seem like an overkill but it's not). A received SQS message is parsed and contents are passed to an external program that forks and exits which keeps the request from blocking.
That is, process.py gets the received (and doped) SQS message, Base64 encoded, as it's only command line argument, forks, exits and does what it's supposed to do after that on its own. Control returns to NotificationResource so the request doesn't block unnecessarily.
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;; set up unicode
(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
;; This from a japanese individual. I hope it works.
(setq default-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8)
;; From Emacs wiki
(setq x-select-request-type '(UTF8_STRING COMPOUND_TEXT TEXT STRING))
;; MS Windows clipboard is UTF-16LE
(set-clipboard-coding-system 'utf-16le-dos)
Also, add this to the beginning of your source files when working with Python (otherwise you'll get "SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc3' in file…" etc. errors):
(Ouch! Looks like WordPress update to 3.1.3 wiped all the modifications I made to the default theme. Admittedly I should've seen that coming.)
What I want to do is basically attach a key-value pair to an EC2 instance when launching it in AWS Management Console and read the value inside the instance when it's running. To be more specific, I use this to to set a key called environment that can have values like dev, stage and prod so that the Django config can decide which database to connect to etc. while starting up. I suspect that in Boto the current instance can somehow be referenced in a more direct fashion but this works as well.
First, append the following to /etc/profile:
# See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/625644/find-out-the-instance-id-from-within-an-ec2-machine
export EC2_INSTANCE_ID="`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id || die \"wget instance-id has failed: $?\"`"
test -n "$EC2_INSTANCE_ID" || die 'cannot obtain instance-id'
export EC2_AVAIL_ZONE="`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone || die \"wget availability-zone has failed: $?\"`"
test -n "$EC2_AVAIL_ZONE" || die 'cannot obtain availability-zone'
export EC2_REGION="`echo \"$EC2_AVAIL_ZONE\" | sed -e 's:\\([0-9][0-9]*\\)[a-z]*\\$:\\\\1:'`"
Now we know the region and instance ID. Next, install Boto by running the following commands:
wget "http://boto.googlecode.com/files/boto-2.0b4.tar.gz"
zcat boto-2.0b4.tar.gz | tar xfv -
cd boto-2.0b4
python ./setup.py install
#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
from boto import ec2
ec2_instance_id = os.environ.get('EC2_INSTANCE_ID')
ec2_region = os.environ.get('EC2_REGION')
conn = ec2.connect_to_region(ec2_region)
reservations = conn.get_all_instances()
instances = [i for r in reservations for i in r.instances]
for instance in instances:
if instance.__dict__['id'] == ec2_instance_id:
print instance.__dict__['tags']['environment']