How to run shell script on multiple EC2 instances using AWS CLI?

Question

I'm trying to do a simple AWS CLI command that can run a shell command to multiple instances.

I know first I need to get the list of instances ids:

aws ec2 describe-instances --filter "Name=tag:Group,Values=Development" --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].[InstanceId]' --output text

I then will have to assign them to an array. Then loop through each instance id and send the command.

Do we have an option for aws to send a shell command to an instance with a specific id?

Something like this:

aws ssm send-command --instance-ids "i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" --document-name "shellscript"

I keep getting this error:

An error occurred (InvalidInstanceId) when calling the SendCommand operation:

I've made sure that the SSM agent is running on that specific instance and made sure everything is correct according to these docs pages.

Answer 1

You can use ssm send-command.

A sample command to see ip address of instance:

aws ssm send-command --instance-ids "your id's" --document-name "AWS-RunShellScript" --comment "IP config" --parameters "commands=ifconfig" --output text

Modify command as per your needs.

---

In case you've got the error, this can happen when you don't have SSM setup on the instance you're trying to access. For a list of instances where you can run SSM commands, run:

aws ssm describe-instance-information --output text

^{See: InvalidInstanceId: An error occurred (InvalidInstanceId) when calling the SendCommand operation.}