ssh-aws-helper

Helpful tool for SSH'ing into EC2 instances.

What, Why?

When looking around I found some existing tools for helping you SSH into EC2 instances. But they all required the use of the SSM agent.

I wanted a simple tool that used native SSH and helped me target instances to log in to.

Setup

Requirments

• Python 3.6+
• Boto3

pip install -r requirements.txt

AWS Config

ssh-aws-helper uses boto3 to get the list of instances from you account. So you will need a config setup with your keys.

By default this is in ~/.aws/credentials

[default]
aws_access_key_id = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
aws_secret_access_key = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

You will also most likely want to setup a default region in the ~/.aws/config. This will save you from having set the region everytime you run ssh-aws-helper.

[default]
region = us-east-1

Symlink

For ease of use I would recommend setting up a symlink from wherever you clone this repo to.

For example:

ln -s /home/seth/dev/ssh-aws-helper/sshelper.py /usr/local/bin/sshelper

Usage

usage: sshelper.py [-h] [--name NAME] [--instance INSTANCE] [--user USER]
                   [--region REGION] [--random] [--oldest] [--newest]

A helpful too for SSH'ing into EC2 instances

optional arguments:
  -h, --help                            Show this help message and exit
  --name NAME, -n NAME                  Shared name tag between instances
  --instance INSTANCE, -i INSTANCE      Instance ID
  --user USER, -u USER                  SSH User
  --region REGION, -g REGION            EC2 Region (default: us-east-1)
  --random, -r (default)                Connect to a random instance in a cluster
  --oldest, -o                          Connect to the oldest instance in a cluster
  --newest, -e                          Connect to the newest instance in a cluster

Examples

Connect to the newest instance with name tag api

sshelper -n api -e

Connect to a specific instance id with the seth user

sshelper -i i-1234567890abcdef0 -u seth