Falco is designed to be installed and run from a Linux environment.

Falco requires the user's resource to have Python 3 installed. If your resource does not have Python 3 installed, instructions to install python can be found at https://python.org.

In addition to python 3 being installed, the user resource requires the python package boto3 to be installed. boto3 is the AWS Software Development Kit for Python - which is what Falco uses to interface with the AWS resources. More information about boto3 can be found at https://github.com/boto/boto3

To install boto3 on python 3 in a Linux environment, use the following command:

sudo python3 -m pip install boto3

If this command fails due to pip not being installed, the following commands work on Debian related Linux systems:

# update system software
sudo apt-get update
# install pip for python 2
sudo apt-get install python-pip
# install pip for python 3
sudo apt-get install python3-pip

The AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)client is a utility from which the user can interface with the AWS "universe": list objects in an S3 database, check on a running EMR cluster, and many other functions.

Instructions on how to install the AWS CLI can be found at: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html

In a Linux environment, the command to install the AWS CLI is: sudo pip install awscli

Once installed, the AWS CLI needs to be configured with your AWS credentials.

Falco requires the user to have an AWS account, and to additionally have created an AWS Access Key. The AWS Access Key enables programmatic access to AWS resources. For information on how to create an AWS Access key, refer to:

Managing Access Keys for IAM Users

When you have your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, you should configure your AWS CLI, by typing the following command:

aws configure

Enter the information as prompted, including the Default region name. You may leave the Default output format by pressing Enter if you are unsure about this field.

Once this configuration is complete, you can use the AWS CLI by typing something like:

aws help

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