SSH to Elastic Beanstalk instance

Question

I just signed up for Amazon's new Elastic Beanstalk offering. What I can't figure out is how to SSH to a Beanstalk instance. I don't have a private key because Beanstalk generated the instance on my behalf.

Answer 1

I found it to be a 2-step process. This assumes that you've already set up a keypair to access EC2 instances in the relevant region.

Configure Security Group

1. In the AWS console, open the EC2 tab.

2. Select the relevant region and click on Security Group.

3. You should have an elasticbeanstalk-default security group if you have launched an Elastic Beanstalk instance in that region.

4. Edit the security group to add a rule for SSH access. The below will lock it down to only allow ingress from a specific IP address.

   SSH | tcp | 22 | 22 | 192.168.1.1/32 

Configure the environment of your Elastic Beanstalk Application

1. If you haven't made a key pair yet, make one by clicking Key Pairs below Security Group in the ec2 tab.
2. In the AWS console, open the Elastic Beanstalk tab.
3. Select the relevant region.
4. Select relevant Environment
5. Select Configurations in left pane.
6. Select Security.
7. Under "EC2 key pair:", select the name of your keypair in the Existing Key Pair field.

If after these steps you see that the Health is set Degraded

that's normal and it just means that the EC2 instance is being updated. Just wait on a few seconds it'll be Ok again

Once the instance has relaunched, you need to get the host name from the AWS Console EC2 instances tab, or via the API. You should then be able to ssh onto the server.

$ ssh -i path/to/keypair.pub [email protected] 

Note: For adding a keypair to the environment configuration, the instances' termination protection must be off as Beanstalk would try to terminate the current instances and start new instances with the KeyPair.

Note: If something is not working, check the "Events" tab in the Beanstalk application / environments and find out what went wrong.

Answer 2

Elastic beanstalk CLI v3 now supports direct SSH with the command eb ssh. E.g.

eb ssh your-environment-name 

No need for all the hassle of setting up security groups of finding out the EC2 instance address.

There's also this cool trick:

eb ssh --force 

That'll temporarily force port 22 open to 0.0.0.0, and keep it open until you exit. This blends a bit of the benefits of the top answer, without the hassle. You can temporarily grant someone other than you access for debugging and whatnot. Of course you'll still need to upload their public key to the host for them to have access. Once you do that (and as long as you're inside eb ssh), the other person can

ssh [email protected]