Introduction

Aren't you tired of looking up EC2 instances by name via the AWS console, the AWS CLI tools or custom scripts? Wouldn't it be great to just type in what you are looking for and get a list of EC2 instances that match your query and that you can connect to by hitting enter?

This is what ec2c (ec2 connect) was made for! ec2c retrieves a list of all running EC2 instances, applies fuzzy search on that list and makes it easy for you to pick just the instance that you need.

Installation

You will need a recent Node.js version such as Node.js v4 to use ec2c. If you have Node.js installed, you can install ec2c via the following command.

npm install -g ec2c

Usage

ec2c comes with a CLI that can be used via ec2c. Just type in ec2c and the command prompt will take you from there. ec2c uses the AWS Node.js SDK which encapsulates authentication with AWS. It does this via the same mechanisms that are supported by the AWS CLI, i.e. it respects the AWS config and environment variables. For configuration instructions check out the documentation of the AWS SDK.

It even supports multiple AWS profiles via the AWS_PROFILE environment variable.

Configuration

ec2c currently has limited configuration parameters. It assumes that defaults are what you want.

• Default User Name: It is possible to define a default user name. To do so, specify it via an EC2C_DEFAULT_USER_NAME environment variable. For example, you could put the following into your .bashrc.

export EC2C_DEFAULT_USER_NAME='ubuntu'

• Private Key: If you do not want to store the private key for your EC2 instances in your SSH authentication agent, you can also specify the EC2C_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable. For example, you could put the following into your .bashrc.

export EC2C_PRIVATE_KEY="$HOME/.ssh/my-private-key-for-ec2-instances.pem"

• AWS Key selection: Use the AWS_PROFILE environment variable to select credentials from your AWS config file $HOME/.aws/credentials.

export AWS_PROFILE="work"

• Cache expiry: ec2c caches the AWS instance list for five minutes. This caching is not always desirable, especially when starting up new instances. Use the environment variable EC2C_CACHE_EXPIRY to define the cache expiry in milliseconds.

# disable ec2c cache
export EC2C_CACHE_EXPIRY='0'

License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Ben Ripkens

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.