This document shows how to get the HCP-customized pyxnat running on Amazon EC2, using a NITRC-CE AMI. (That's a lot of TLAs in one sentence; if you have no idea what this is all about, you might start here.)
1. Get your instance running on EC2 and log in. I recommend the NITRC-CE AMI, although if you have some reason not to use it (Ubuntu-hater?), I've done all this on a vanilla Amazon Linux AMI and it wasn't that much harder. This is a complicated step, at least if you've never used AWS, and I'm not going to document it in detail (yet) because I'm not convinced I completely understand what I did. For now, I'll just offer encouragement: I got one running, you can do it too.
2. Install the non-Python dependencies.
ubuntu@ip-w-x-y-z:~$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev
3. Install virtualenv.
ubuntu@ip-w-x-y-z:~$ sudo pip install virtualenv
4. Source the virtual environment's activate script; you'll need to do this for any shell where you're using this virtual environment.
ubuntu@ip-w-x-y-z:~$ . pyxnat-env/bin/activate (pyxnat-env)ubuntu@ip-w-x-y-z:~$
Note that your shell prompt now includes the name of the virtual environment (pyxnat-env).
5. Install pyxnat (with its dependencies) into the virtual environment.
(pyxnat-env)ubuntu@ip-w-x-y-z:~$ pip install git+git://github.com/Human-Connectome-Project/pyxnat@hcp-db#egg=pyxnat