How to SSH and run commands in EC2 using boto3?

Question

I want to be able to ssh into an EC2 instance, and run some shell commands in it, like this.

How do I do it in boto3?

Answer 1

This thread is a bit old, but since I've spent a frustrating afternoon discovering a simple solution, I might as well share it.

NB This is not a strict answer to the OP's question, as it doesn't use ssh. But, one point of boto3 is that you don't have to - so I think in most circumstances this would be the preferred way of achieving the OP's goal, as s/he can use his/her existing boto3 configuration trivially.

AWS' Run Command is built into botocore (so this should apply to both boto and boto3, as far as I know) but disclaimer: I've only tested this with boto3.

def execute_commands_on_linux_instances(client, commands, instance_ids):     """Runs commands on remote linux instances     :param client: a boto/boto3 ssm client     :param commands: a list of strings, each one a command to execute on the instances     :param instance_ids: a list of instance_id strings, of the instances on which to execute the command     :return: the response from the send_command function (check the boto3 docs for ssm client.send_command() )     """      resp = client.send_command(         DocumentName="AWS-RunShellScript", # One of AWS' preconfigured documents         Parameters={'commands': commands},         InstanceIds=instance_ids,     )     return resp  # Example use: ssm_client = boto3.client('ssm') # Need your credentials here commands = ['echo "hello world"'] instance_ids = ['an_instance_id_string'] execute_commands_on_linux_instances(ssm_client, commands, instance_ids) 

For windows instance powershell commands you'd use an alternative option:

        DocumentName="AWS-RunPowerShellScript", 

Answer 2

You can use the following code snippet to ssh to an EC2 instance and run some command from boto3.

import boto3 import botocore import paramiko  key = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key_file(path/to/mykey.pem) client = paramiko.SSHClient() client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())  # Connect/ssh to an instance try:     # Here 'ubuntu' is user name and 'instance_ip' is public IP of EC2     client.connect(hostname=instance_ip, username="ubuntu", pkey=key)      # Execute a command(cmd) after connecting/ssh to an instance     stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command(cmd)     print stdout.read()      # close the client connection once the job is done     client.close()     break  except Exception, e:     print e