Access an EC2 instance

You may need to SSH into an EC2 instance for certain task, such as checking the log files for that instance, as described in Detecting EC2 Errors.

To SSH into an instance, do the following:

1. Open the EC2 Dashboard.

2. Select Instances from the left-hand navigation section.

3. Select the instance to which you want to connect.

4. Click on the Connect button, or select Connect from the Actions pull-down menu.

5. Select A Java SSH Client directly from my browser (Java required). Specify ec2-user as the User Name, and provide the path to your copy of the key pair you downloaded to your local host. Click Launch SSH Client.

6. This will open up a shell window to the EC2 instance. When you first connect in this manner, you may be prompted to create various directories. Respond by clicking Yes for each prompt.

Alternatively you can open a shell window and SSH into an instance using the following command:

ssh -i /path/to/keypair.pem ec2-user@<Public DNS>

For example, if your keypair, named newkey.pem, is stored in your c:/stuff/ directory, you can access the instance with a public DNS of ec2-54-242-94-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com as follows:

ssh -i c:/stuff/newkey.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-242-94-98.compute-1.amazonaws.com