SSH to EC2 instance ID

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.

	# ssh-instance - function to let you SSH to an EC2 instance ID
	# Written by Mike Babineau <michael.babineau@gmail.com>. Original here: https://gist.github.com/mbabineau/319882/
	# Put this in ~/.profile and reload your terminal
	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
	}

view raw ssh-instance-function.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

(note: cross-posted here)