AWS EC2 Instance Metadata Quick Reference

Sometimes I need to get information about an EC2 instance within a script but the AWS documentation doesn’t provide many useful examples. Instead of poking around through all the available metadata endpoints, I made this list of curl commands to retrieve commonly used EC2 information. Run any of these commands within an EC2 instance. These commands have been tested on an Amazon Linux 2 instance.

These are not all the possible values you can retrieve from the metadata service, these are only the ones I found most useful.

Note that these commands are using Instance Metadata Service Version 1 (IMDSv1) which use a simple request/response method. More information is available in the official AWS docs.

If you want a bash script that you can copy and paste, scroll down to the bottom of this article.

Metadata Retrieval with curl

View all available categories of metadata:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/

ami-id
ami-launch-index
ami-manifest-path
block-device-mapping/
events/
hibernation/
hostname
iam/
identity-credentials/
instance-action
instance-id
instance-life-cycle
instance-type
local-hostname
local-ipv4
mac
metrics/
network/
placement/
profile
public-keys/
reservation-id
security-groups
services/

Get instance AMI ID:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ami-id

ami-0d43f810ac49e9511

Get hostname:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/hostname

ip-10-128-128-128.us-west-1.compute.internal

Get AWS account ID:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/identity-credentials/ec2/info | grep "AccountId" | awk -F\" '{print $4}'

123456789012

Get instance ID:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id

i-01234567890f1234b

Get instance type

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-type

t2.medium

Get IPv4 address:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4

10.128.128.128

Get MAC address:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/mac

05:5f:bd:1a:4c:77

Get availability zone:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone

us-west-1a

Get availability zone ID:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone-id

usw1-az1

Get security groups associated with the instance:

$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/security-groups

my-security-group-1
my-security-group-2
my-security-group-3

Bash Script

Copy and paste this bash snippet and use values as needed:

AMI_ID=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ami-id)
HOSTNAME=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/hostname)
ACCOUNT_ID=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/identity-credentials/ec2/info | grep "AccountId" | awk -F\" '{print $4}')
INSTANCE_ID=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)
INSTANCE_TYPE=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-type)
LOCAL_IPV4=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4)
MAC_ADDRESS=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/mac)
AVAILABILITY_ZONE=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone)
AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone-id)
SECURITY_GROUPS=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/security-groups)

echo $AMI_ID
echo $HOSTNAME
echo $ACCOUNT_ID
echo $INSTANCE_ID
echo $INSTANCE_TYPE
echo $LOCAL_IPV4
echo $MAC_ADDRESS
echo $AVAILABILITY_ZONE
echo $AVAILABILITY_ZONE_ID
echo $SECURITY_GROUPS