Get public and private IP address of an EC2 instance from the command line

July 24, 2017 Leave a comment

Sometimes we may get requirements to identify the public ip address of an ec2 instance from the command line. There are various ways to perform this operation.

  1. Using AWS CLI
  2. Using a simple REST call
aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids  --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].PublicIpAddress' --output text

If we are on the same EC2 host, we can obtain the details of the EC2 instance using the instance metadata service.

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/


ami-id
ami-launch-index
ami-manifest-path
block-device-mapping/
hostname
iam/
instance-action
instance-id
instance-type
local-hostname
local-ipv4
mac
metrics/
network/
placement/
profile
public-hostname
public-ipv4
public-keys/
reservation-id
security-groups
services/

Using this, for getting the private IP, the command will be

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4

For getting the public IP, the command will be

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4

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