Passing script as user data into AWS EC2 spot instance

Question

I am trying to create a new spot request using aws cli but it gives me an error if i pass a shell script as user-data to spot request

i tried this

    aws ec2 request-spot-instances --spot-price "0.04" --instance-count 1 --launch-specification "{\"UserData\": \"/srv/user-data.sh\",\"InstanceType\": \"m1.small\"}"

and this gives me an error

    Invalid BASE64 encoding of user data (400 response code)

and

how can i Tags my spot request with Name & Value

Answer 1

Exactly that, aws expects a base64 encoded string to be passed for the UserData value. Why the tools doesn't do this for you, I don't know.

So, instead of the string:

  /srv/user-data.sh

Use a base64 encoded version of the string (using an online encoder, I got the following):

 L3Nydi91c2VyLWRhdGEuc2g=

I'm guessing the final json it should look something like this:

   '{"UserData": "L3Nydi91c2VyLWRhdGEuc2g=","InstanceType": "m1.small"}'

Creating tags is pretty straight forward. Here's a link to the 'aws' CLI command documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/create-tags.html

You'll need to determine the resource AMI id:

  aws ec2 create-tags --resources ami-78a54011 --tags Key=Name,Value=myname