How to SSH and run commands in EC2 using boto3?

This thread is a bit old, but since I've spent a frustrating afternoon discovering a simple solution, I might as well share it.

NB This is not a strict answer to the OP's question, as it doesn't use ssh. But, one point of boto3 is that you don't have to - so I think in most circumstances this would be the preferred way of achieving the OP's goal, as s/he can use his/her existing boto3 configuration trivially.

AWS' Run Command is built into botocore (so this should apply to both boto and boto3, as far as I know) but disclaimer: I've only tested this with boto3.

def execute_commands_on_linux_instances(client, commands, instance_ids):    """Runs commands on remote linux instances    :param client: a boto/boto3 ssm client    :param commands: a list of strings, each one a command to execute on the instances    :param instance_ids: a list of instance_id strings, of the instances on which to execute the command    :return: the response from the send_command function (check the boto3 docs for ssm client.send_command() )    """    resp = client.send_command(        DocumentName="AWS-RunShellScript", # One of AWS' preconfigured documents        Parameters={'commands': commands},        InstanceIds=instance_ids,    )    return resp# Example use:ssm_client = boto3.client('ssm') # Need your credentials herecommands = ['echo "hello world"']instance_ids = ['an_instance_id_string']execute_commands_on_linux_instances(ssm_client, commands, instance_ids)

For windows instance powershell commands you'd use an alternative option:

        DocumentName="AWS-RunPowerShellScript",

You can use the following code snippet to ssh to an EC2 instance and run some command from boto3.

import boto3import botocoreimport paramikokey = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key_file(path/to/mykey.pem)client = paramiko.SSHClient()client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())# Connect/ssh to an instancetry:    # Here 'ubuntu' is user name and 'instance_ip' is public IP of EC2    client.connect(hostname=instance_ip, username="ubuntu", pkey=key)    # Execute a command(cmd) after connecting/ssh to an instance    stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command(cmd)    print stdout.read()    # close the client connection once the job is done    client.close()    breakexcept Exception, e:    print e

You can also use kitten python library for that which is just a wrapper around boto3. You can also run same command on multiple servers at the same time using this utility.

For Example.

kitten run uptime ubuntu 18.105.107.20