mikebabineau engineer

SSH to EC2 Instance ID

02 Mar 2010

I often find myself looking up EC2 nodes by instance ID so I can grab the external DNS name and SSH in. Fed up with the extra “ec2-describe-instance , copy, paste” layer, I threw together a function (basically a fancy alias) to SSH into an EC2 instance referenced by ID.

Assuming you’re on Mac OS X / Linux, just put this somewhere in ~/.profile, reload your terminal, and you’re good to go. Alternatively, you can use the shell script version.

Update (3/5/10): Added region support

Function version (latest source here)

function ssh-instance() {
    if [ $# -lt 1 ] || [ $# -gt 3 ]; then
        echo "Usage: ssh-instance [-r region] <instance id>" 
    else 
        case "$1" in
            "-r")
                if [ $# -eq 3 ] && [ -n "`echo $3|egrep \"^i-[0-9a-z]+\"`" ]; then
                    ssh `ec2-describe-instances --region $2 $3|grep "^INSTANCE"|cut -f4`
                else
                    echo "Usage: ssh-instance [-r region] <instance id>"
                    return 1
                fi;;
            i-[0-9a-zA-Z]*)
                if [ $# -eq 3 ] && [ "$2" == "-r" ]; then
                    ssh `ec2-describe-instances --region $3 $1|grep "^INSTANCE"|cut -f4`
                elif [ $# -eq 1 ]; then
                    ssh `ec2-describe-instances $1|grep "^INSTANCE"|cut -f4`
                else
                    echo "Usage: ssh-instance [-r region] <instance id>"
                    return 1
                fi;;
            *)  
                echo "Usage: ssh-instance [-r region] <instance id>" 
            esac
    fi

    return 0
}

And the script version

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