Update Amazon's Route 53

update-route53 is designed to automatically update your Route 53 configuration when one of your Amazon EC2 instances gets a new IP.

With a proper configuration, the instance's hostname will have its CNAME record updated to point to its EC2 hostname. This makes the hostname resolve to the public or private IP address, depending on whether you are resolving from within the EC2 network.

Installation

You can get a copy of the source by using:

$ git clone https://github.com/ecometrica/update-route53.git

Note that this program requires Python 2.6 or higher.

Next, install the program into your root directory of your EC2 instance:

$ sudo install -d -m 0700 -o root -g root /root/bin/
$ sudo install -m 0700 -o root -g root update-route53.py /root/bin/update-route53.py

Boto

We rely on boto to talk to Amazon Web Services.

Under Debian or Ubuntu, run the following to install it:

$ sudo apt-get install python-boto

Amazon Web Services

Make sure you have an Amazon Web Services (AWS) user which can access your Route 53 configuration:

Go to your AWS control panel and select the IAM service.
Click on the Users tab and create or select a user.

In the Permissions tab, attach a policy that gives the following permissions:

{
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":"s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
            "Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::*"
        },{
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":"route53:ListHostedZones",
            "Resource":"*"
        },{
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":"route53:GetHostedZone",
            "Resource":"arn:aws:route53:::*"
        },{
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":"route53:ListResourceRecordSets",
            "Resource":"arn:aws:route53:::*"
        },{
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action":"route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets",
            "Resource":"arn:aws:route53:::*"
        }
    ]
}

Create a /root/.boto configuration file containing:

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = *AWS Access Key*
aws_secret_access_key = *AWS Secret Key*

Make sure the /root/.boto file has the right permissions. Under Unix, you'll want:

$ sudo chmod 0600 /root/.boto

Debian and Ubuntu

In order to get your system to update its DNS records when its IP addresses change, you need to install an if-up hook:

$ sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root debian/update-route53 /etc/network/if-up.d/

Reporting bugs and submitting patches

Please check our issue tracker for known bugs and feature requests.

We accept pull requests for fixes and new features.

Credits

Maxime Dupuis and Simon Law wrote this program, with the generous support of Ecometrica.