login using "ec2-user" instead of root using user data in aws

Question

I have an Amazon EC2 instance based off of a RHEL 6.4 64bit AMI. After writing some shell scripts; I created my own AMI Image off of it.

I'm writing user data section which will remove the contents under /home/ec2-user(sudo rm -rf /home/ec2-user/*) and then execute that script. But i'm unable to remove any files.

what I want:

• I want to remove files.
• One more weird use case I've, by default user data section enters as "root" user but is there possibility to enter as "ec2-user" user and get my work done..?

Answer 1

User data always runs as root so don't use sudo. Below runs the cmd as ec2-user. If you want to start an executable do so in the background (ie. add & at the end)

su ec2-user -c 'do whatever you want; ./run.sh &'

Answer 2

You cannot do it in the normal ec2-user account Do this command to be the deploy user ...

sudo su - deploy

which will then allow you to go to your app at the current location ...

cd /srv/www/sample_app/current