Cloud Application Architectures

Amazon EC2 Command-Line Reference

The Amazon EC2 command-line tools are wrappers around the web services API. In fact, there is basically a one-to-one mapping between a command line, its arguments, and an API call of a similar name with similar parameters.

Every command has the following general form:

command [GENERAL OPTIONS] [COMMAND OPTIONS]

For example, the command to start an EC2 instance looks like this:

ec2-run-instances -v ami-123456 -g dmz

In this instance, the -v is a general option for specifying verbose output, and ami-1234566 -g dmz are the command-specific options.

The general options are:

-

Pull in command parameters from standard input.

-C certificate

The certificate to authenticate your web services request with Amazon. This value overrides the environment variable EC2_CERT.

--connection-timeout

Indicates an alternate SOAP connection timeout in seconds.

--debug

Prints out debug information.

--headers

Display column headers.

--help

Prints out help for the command in question.

-K privatekey

The private key to authenticate your web services request with Amazon. This value overrides the environment variable EC2_PRIVATE_KEY.

--region region

Specifies the region to apply to the command.

--request-timeout

Indicates an alternate SOAP request timeout in seconds.

--show-empty-fields

Displays empty columns in command responses as (nil).

-U url

Specifies the Amazon Web Services URL to make the API call against. This option overrides the EC2_URL environment variable.

-v

Indicates that you would like verbose ...