How to get the instance id from within an ec2 inst

Question

How can I find out the instance id of an ec2 instance from within the ec2 instance?

Answer 1

In Go you can use the goamz package.

import (
    "github.com/mitchellh/goamz/aws"
    "log"
)

func getId() (id string) {
    idBytes, err := aws.GetMetaData("instance-id")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatalf("Error getting instance-id: %v.", err)
    }

    id = string(idBytes)

    return id
}

Here's the GetMetaData source.

Answer 2

See this post - note that the IP address in the URL given is constant (which confused me at first), but the data returned is specific to your instance.

Answer 3

You can try this:

#!/bin/bash
aws_instance=$(wget -q -O- http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)
aws_region=$(wget -q -O- http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/hostname)
aws_region=${aws_region#*.}
aws_region=${aws_region%%.*}
aws_zone=`ec2-describe-instances $aws_instance --region $aws_region`
aws_zone=`expr match "$aws_zone" ".*\($aws_region[a-z]\)"`

Answer 4

Just Type:

ec2metadata --instance-id

Answer 5

For Ruby:

require 'rubygems'
require 'aws-sdk'
require 'net/http'

metadata_endpoint = 'http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/'
instance_id = Net::HTTP.get( URI.parse( metadata_endpoint + 'instance-id' ) )

ec2 = AWS::EC2.new()
instance = ec2.instances[instance_id]

Answer 6

A c# .net class I wrote for EC2 metadata from the http api. I will build it up with functionality as needed. You can run with it if you like it.

using Amazon;
using System.Net;

namespace AT.AWS
{
    public static class HttpMetaDataAPI
    {
        public static bool TryGetPublicIP(out string publicIP)
        {
            return TryGetMetaData("public-ipv4", out publicIP);
        }
        public static bool TryGetPrivateIP(out string privateIP)
        {
            return TryGetMetaData("local-ipv4", out privateIP);
        }
        public static bool TryGetAvailabilityZone(out string availabilityZone)
        {
            return TryGetMetaData("placement/availability-zone", out availabilityZone);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the url of a given AWS service, according to the name of the required service and the AWS Region that this machine is in
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="serviceName">The service we are seeking (such as ec2, rds etc)</param>
        /// <remarks>Each AWS service has a different endpoint url for each region</remarks>
        /// <returns>True if the operation was succesful, otherwise false</returns>
        public static bool TryGetServiceEndpointUrl(string serviceName, out string serviceEndpointStringUrl)
        {
            // start by figuring out what region this instance is in.
            RegionEndpoint endpoint;
            if (TryGetRegionEndpoint(out endpoint))
            {
                // now that we know the region, we can get details about the requested service in that region
                var details = endpoint.GetEndpointForService(serviceName);
                serviceEndpointStringUrl = (details.HTTPS ? "https://" : "http://") + details.Hostname;
                return true;
            }
            // satisfy the compiler by assigning a value to serviceEndpointStringUrl
            serviceEndpointStringUrl = null;
            return false;
        }
        public static bool TryGetRegionEndpoint(out RegionEndpoint endpoint)
        {
            // we can get figure out the region end point from the availability zone
            // that this instance is in, so we start by getting the availability zone:
            string availabilityZone;
            if (TryGetAvailabilityZone(out availabilityZone))
            {
                // name of the availability zone is <nameOfRegionEndpoint>[a|b|c etc]
                // so just take the name of the availability zone and chop off the last letter
                var nameOfRegionEndpoint = availabilityZone.Substring(0, availabilityZone.Length - 1);
                endpoint = RegionEndpoint.GetBySystemName(nameOfRegionEndpoint);
                return true;
            }
            // satisfy the compiler by assigning a value to endpoint
            endpoint = RegionEndpoint.USWest2;
            return false;
        }
        /// <summary>
        /// Downloads instance metadata
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns>True if the operation was successful, false otherwise</returns>
        /// <remarks>The operation will be unsuccessful if the machine running this code is not an AWS EC2 machine.</remarks>
        static bool TryGetMetaData(string name, out string result)
        {
            result = null;
            try { result = new WebClient().DownloadString("http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/" + name); return true; }
            catch { return false; }
        }

/************************************************************
 * MetaData keys.
 *   Use these keys to write more functions as you need them
 * **********************************************************
ami-id
ami-launch-index
ami-manifest-path
block-device-mapping/
hostname
instance-action
instance-id
instance-type
local-hostname
local-ipv4
mac
metrics/
network/
placement/
profile
public-hostname
public-ipv4
public-keys/
reservation-id
security-groups
*************************************************************/
    }
}