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

Run this:

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/

You will be able to see different types of attributes which are provided by aws.

Use this link to view more

Answer 2

For .NET People :

string instanceId = new StreamReader(
      HttpWebRequest.Create("http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id")
      .GetResponse().GetResponseStream())
    .ReadToEnd();

Answer 3

A more contemporary solution.

From Amazon Linux the ec2-metadata command is already installed.

From the terminal

ec2-metadata -help

Will give you the available options

ec2-metadata -i

will return

instance-id: yourid