essh

Enhanced ssh command line for EC2 that can find an instance by the instance id, instance name tag, or private IP address. It even supports indexing when multiple instances share the same name (i.e. auto-scaling groups).

Install

pip install essh

Usage

# To ssh by instance id
essh <instance id>
# To run a command over ssh on instance id
essh <instance id> ls /tmp
# To ssh by private ip
essh <private ip>
# To ssh to the first instance with this name tag
essh <tag name>
# To ssh to the second instance with this name tag
essh <tag name>[1] 

FAQ

How do you specify the username to use on the ssh command?

Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host *
  User centos

If you don't want to do this, essh will try different usernames in the following order: centos, ec2-user, ubuntu, admin, bitnami, and root.

How do you ignore IP address changes?

Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

CheckHostIP no
StrictHostKeyChecking no

How do you change the default keypair directory or extension?

The default keypair directory is ~/.ssh and default keypair extension is .pem. To change either of these set the --keypair-dir and/or --keypair-extension options on the command line.