How to get self Instance Id of the running EC2 instance using boto?

Question

Using python boto API (not Boto3), how to I fetch for the self-instance ID of the CPU running the script in the user-data.

Answer 1

Use boto to retrieve the instance ID from the local metadata service, as follows:

import boto.utils
meta = boto.utils.get_instance_metadata()
id = meta['instance-id']
print('instance ID:', id)

Note that boto3 does not include this capability. One option is to simply use the native urllib package to query directly from the metadata service, as follows:

# For python v2
import urllib2
id = urllib2.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read()
print('instance ID:', id)

# For python v3
import urllib.request
id = urllib.request.urlopen('http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id').read().decode()
print('instance ID:', id)

Alternatively, you could pip install and use adamchainz/ec2-metadata, as follows:

from ec2_metadata import ec2_metadata
print('region:', ec2_metadata.region)
print('instance ID:', ec2_metadata.instance_id)