Ruby Gem: ruby-aaws

This is an awesome gem, though I ran into many errors when I first started to try it out. Here's the code I was trying:

require 'amazon/aws'
require 'amazon/aws/search'
require 'pp'

include Amazon::AWS
include Amazon::AWS::Search

ASSOCIATES_ID = "removed"
KEY_ID = "removed"

#req = Request.new(KEY_ID, ASSOCIATES_ID, 'us', false)

is = ItemSearch.new( 'Books', { 'Title' => 'Ruby' } )
is.response_group = ResponseGroup.new( :Small )
req = Request.new(KEY_ID, ASSOCIATES_ID, 'us', false)
resp = req.search( is )

pp(resp.item_search_response)

pp(resp)    

I first had trouble figuring out that I needed to put my AWS "secret" key in ~/.amazonrc.

I was getting UTF-8 errors, too. I think adding this to my ~/.amazonrc fixed the problem:

encoding = 'UTF-8'

Hmmm. I guess using the cache also causes UTF-8 related errors.

UPDATE: Finally, late last night I figured it out. The example aaws code I was basing my tests on uses ItemLookup.

is = ItemSearch.new( 'Books', { 'Title' => 'Ruby' } )
is.response_group = ResponseGroup.new( :Small ) 
req = Request.new(KEY_ID, ASSOCIATES_ID, 'us', true)
resp = req.search( is )

item_sets = resp.item_search_response[0].items
  item_sets[0..3].each do |item_set|
  item_set.item.each do |item|
    attribs = item.item_attributes[0]
    puts attribs
  end
end

The way the secret key is handled seems odd. Maybe there is a better way? The ruby-aaws RDoc says its the only way though.

UPDATE: There are different ways to set where the amazonrc file is. In my case, running unicorn via daemontools caused ENV['HOME'] to be nil, resulting in amazon.rb trying to evaluate ENV['HOMEDRIVE'] + ENV['HOMEPATH'], causing a NoMethodError that was very difficult to decipher (running unicorn with the "-d" option after invoking the Ruby interpreter helped track down the cause).

I had tried setting $AMAZONRCFILE at first, then $AMAZONRCDIR, but that didn't work I noticed in amazon.rb that it was looking for ENV['AMAZONRCDIR'], so I set it in config.ru and voila - functionality!!