This setup allows for quick hacking with an sbt console on an EC2 instance -- very useful for trying out the AWS APIs when you need to try things out. As an example, I wanted to make sure I understood how to get the various bits of meta-data that are visible only on EC2. Create the following files and run setup.sh to run everything.

playbook.yml

---
- hosts: all
  vars:

  tasks:
  - name: Install essential base packages
    apt: pkg={{ item }} update_cache=yes
    sudo: yes
    with_items:
      - openjdk-7-jdk
      - curl
      - tmux
      
  - name: Retrieve sbt package
    command: curl -O http://repo.scala-sbt.org/scalasbt/sbt-native-packages/org/scala-sbt/sbt/0.13.1/sbt.deb

  - name: Install sbt package
    command: dpkg -i sbt.deb
    sudo: yes

  - name: Initialize sbt
    command: sbt exit

setup.sh

# you'll first want to create a keypair for EC2 -- I called mine 'vagrant' and downloaded 
# the vagrant.pem to the directory where I was running all this (see below)

# also, I assume you already have vagrant and ansible installed

vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws

mkdir ec2-experiments
cd ec2-experiments

# This dummy box is used to bootstrap Vagrant on EC2
vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box

vagrant up --provider=aws

Vagrantfile

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  config.vm.box = "dummy"
  
  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    aws.access_key_id = "..."
    aws.secret_access_key = "..."
    # you'll need to create the EC2 keypair used here -- I called it vagrant for easy tracking
    aws.keypair_name = "vagrant"
    # you'll want to use a group that has at least SSH open
    aws.security_groups = ["default"]

    # you'll need to find an AMI that's appropriate for the region you're using
    # use this tool to do that: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/
    aws.ami = "ami-c6402cf6"
    # I wanted an instance with at least a few cores for faster compilation
    aws.instance_type = "m1.xlarge"

    aws.region = "us-west-2"

    # You might not really need this, but I was trying to test how user-data showed up through
    # The AWS java api
    aws.user_data = "..."
    
    # Set this to something identifiable so you can easily find your instance if you have more than a few
    aws.tags = {
      "Name" => "aws-experiments"
    }

    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "vagrant.pem"
  end
  
  config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
    # This isn't necessary, but can be useful if you run into trouble
    ansible.verbose = 'vv'
    ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"
  end
end