boto3 equivalent to boto.utils.get_instance_metadata()?

Question

In regular boto 2.38 I used to access instance metadata (e.g. get current stack-name), through boto's

boto.utils.get_instance_metadata()

Is there an equivalent in boto3, or do I need to go to the down level direct http address to fetch metadata about the running instance?

score 18 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

18

Nope, still no equivalent in boto3, just hit this gap myself.
They have an open feature request for this https://github.com/boto/boto3/issues/313 that references this question.

As for workarounds,
you can continue to use boto.utils or use urllib/urllib2 to do the HTTP requests manually ie.

# Python2
import urllib2
instanceid = urllib2.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read()

# Python3
import urllib.request
instanceid = urllib.request.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read().decode()

see What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python? for a quick intro on urllib and http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ec2-instance-metadata.html#instancedata-data-categories for the URI structure of the metadata service.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Nov 16 '15 at 11:05

Nath

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is this *still* true?! siiiiiiigh – dwanderson Jan 10 '18 at 20:13
@dwanderson Unfortunately Yes ! – jimy Mar 08 '18 at 12:55
Additionally you can use the adamchainz/ec2-metadata package. It would have to be pip installed so is perhaps not ideal for Lambda but this package is simple to use. – jarmod Jan 07 '20 at 16:33

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '20 at 04:01

3

You could use the third-party library ec2-metadata.

Here an example from the docs showing how to get your EC2 region:

  pip install ec2-metadata

  >>> from ec2_metadata import ec2_metadata
  >>> print(ec2_metadata.region)
  us-east-1

edited Apr 13 '20 at 04:01

Jason

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answered Mar 23 '20 at 10:54

barbasa

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Steven · Answer 3 · 2022-02-28T08:40:01.410

2

You can fetch specific metadata from the the IMDSFetcher in botocore:

from botocore.utils import IMDSFetcher

IMDSFetcher()._get_request("/latest/meta-data/instance-type", None).text

This will also work on instances where IMDSv2 is enforced.

edited Feb 28 '22 at 08:40

answered Feb 17 '22 at 08:08

Steven

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This does not work fir IMDSv2 enforced enviroments. as a third argument `token=IMDSFetcher()._fetch_metadata_token()` must be given. otherwise this is the only valid answer to the origin question! – Markus Jan 18 '23 at 08:20

boto3 equivalent to boto.utils.get_instance_metadata()?

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