How to SSH and run commands in EC2 using boto3?

Question

I want to be able to ssh into an EC2 instance, and run some shell commands in it, like this.

How do I do it in boto3?

Answer 1

This thread is a bit old, but since I've spent a frustrating afternoon discovering a simple solution, I might as well share it.

NB This is not a strict answer to the OP's question, as it doesn't use ssh. But, one point of boto3 is that you don't have to - so I think in most circumstances this would be the preferred way of achieving the OP's goal, as s/he can use his/her existing boto3 configuration trivially.

AWS' Run Command is built into botocore (so this should apply to both boto and boto3, as far as I know) but disclaimer: I've only tested this with boto3.

def execute_commands_on_linux_instances(client, commands, instance_ids):
    """Runs commands on remote linux instances
    :param client: a boto/boto3 ssm client
    :param commands: a list of strings, each one a command to execute on the instances
    :param instance_ids: a list of instance_id strings, of the instances on which to execute the command
    :return: the response from the send_command function (check the boto3 docs for ssm client.send_command() )
    """

    resp = client.send_command(
        DocumentName="AWS-RunShellScript", # One of AWS' preconfigured documents
        Parameters={'commands': commands},
        InstanceIds=instance_ids,
    )
    return resp

# Example use:
ssm_client = boto3.client('ssm') # Need your credentials here
commands = ['echo "hello world"']
instance_ids = ['an_instance_id_string']
execute_commands_on_linux_instances(ssm_client, commands, instance_ids)

For windows instance powershell commands you'd use an alternative option:

        DocumentName="AWS-RunPowerShellScript",