AWS: Using the command line to get an EC2 instance ID

Chris Mendez -

Here are three ways to get the instance ID of an EC2 server using the command line.

Built-in

If you are logged into an Ubuntu machine.

ec2metadata --instance-id

Curl

curl command using an IP address.

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

curl command simplified.

curl http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id

Wget

If curl is not available, try wget.

wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id

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