sshaws

Simply connect to your 'EC2 Instance Connect'-capable AWS EC2 servers using one command. If you use 'EC2 Instance Connect' as described in this article you already noticed that it can become a hassle to connect to instances, especially if you frequently connect to different instances. The sshaws command allows takes care of gathering the necessary information, calling ec2-instance-connect (to register your public key) and, finally, ssh to the instance.

With sshaws, in the best case, connecting to your instances will look like this:

Support for SSH connections through AWS Session Manager is also included. This allows you to connect to EC2 instances without Internet access (provided there's a VPC endpoint available) or whose security group does no allow ingress on port 22.

Requirements

python3 and pip
configured aws credentials and rights to connect to the instance
instance needs to support ec2-instance-connect (AWS AMIs support that + you can install it on your servers)
public (or private) IP needs to be reachable

Changes to requirements if using SSM tunnel:

credentials with rights to call aws ssm start-session on ressource document/AWS-StartSSHSession
instance needs to be running the SSM Agent version 2.3.672.0 or later (inc. an appropriate IAM role)
instance needs to be reachable through Internet or an SSM VPC endpoint

Installation

pip install sshaws

You might need to use pip3 if you are not in a virtualenv. You might want to install the package in user space (if you don't have sudo rights). E.g.:

pip3 install --user sshaws

Usage

sshaws <instance-id>

<instance-id> should be replaced by something like: i-074126021e7b3e7f5. The Instance ID can be found in the AWS Console (EC2 view, ECS task description, etc.) You can also use an alias for <instance-id> if aliases are configured in .sshaws.conf. (see Config section)

By default it will use the default region, your ssh key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa (private) and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (public) and ec2-user as the username used to connect. See the help output to see how to change these options:

sshaws --help

More Examples

To look for the instance in two different regions use:

sshaws <instance-id> --regions eu-central-1 us-east-1

Config

To avoid having to set command line arguments again and again you can write a config file to ~/.sshaws.conf.

This is an example:

{
    "os_user": "kevin",
    "use_private_ip": true,
    "use_ssm": false,
    "regions": ["eu-central-1", "us-east-1"],
    "key_file_path_private": "/home/example/.ssh/somekey",
    "key_file_path_public": "/home/example/.ssh/somekey.pub",
    "forward_agent": true,
    "aliases": {
        "my-ec2-bastion": "i-074126021e7b3e7f5",
        "my-web-server": "i-004cb95e71985a510"
    }
}