Is there a way to obtain the instance id within an ec2 instance [duplicate]

Question

I try to launch a service on ec2 instance. the service is supposed to send out the id of the instance. I know this could be obtained using something like curl http://0.0.0.0/latest/meta-data. is there any other ways that you could directly get the meta data maybe from the instance shell or some APIs in python?

Answer 1

Amazon EC2 instance metadata can be accessed via:

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

To retrieve the ID of the instance from which that request is made:

http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id/

This can be retrieved by curl, wget, web browser or anything that makes a call to retrieve an HTTP page.

If you wish to do it programmatically, here's some code from boto3 equivalent to boto.utils.get_instance_metadata()?:

# Python2
import urllib2
instanceid = urllib2.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read()

# Python3
import urllib.request
instanceid = urllib.request.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read().decode()

There is also a boto.utils.get_instance_metadata() call in boto (but not boto3) that returns the instance metadata as a nested Python dictionary.