GetPasswordData - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

GetPasswordData

Retrieves the encrypted administrator password for a running Windows instance.

The Windows password is generated at boot by the EC2Config service or EC2Launch scripts (Windows Server 2016 and later). This usually only happens the first time an instance is launched. For more information, see EC2Config and EC2Launch in the Amazon EC2 User Guide.

For the EC2Config service, the password is not generated for rebundled AMIs unless Ec2SetPassword is enabled before bundling.

The password is encrypted using the key pair that you specified when you launched the instance. You must provide the corresponding key pair file.

When you launch an instance, password generation and encryption may take a few minutes. If you try to retrieve the password before it's available, the output returns an empty string. We recommend that you wait up to 15 minutes after launching an instance before trying to retrieve the generated password.

Request Parameters

The following parameters are for this specific action. For more information about required and optional parameters that are common to all actions, see Common Query Parameters.

DryRun

Checks whether you have the required permissions for the action, without actually making the request, and provides an error response. If you have the required permissions, the error response is DryRunOperation. Otherwise, it is UnauthorizedOperation.

Type: Boolean

Required: No

InstanceId

The ID of the Windows instance.

Type: String

Required: Yes

Response Elements

The following elements are returned by the service.

instanceId

The ID of the Windows instance.

Type: String

passwordData

The password of the instance. Returns an empty string if the password is not available.

Type: String

requestId

The ID of the request.

Type: String

timestamp

The time the data was last updated.

Type: Timestamp

Errors

For information about the errors that are common to all actions, see Common client error codes.

Examples

Example

This example returns the encrypted version of the administrator password for the specified instance.

Sample Request

https://ec2.amazonaws.com/?Action=GetPasswordData &InstanceId=i-1234567890abcdef0 &AUTHPARAMS

Sample Response

<GetPasswordDataResponse xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2016-11-15/"> <requestId>59dbff89-35bd-4eac-99ed-be587EXAMPLE</requestId> <instanceId>i-1234567890abcdef0</instanceId> <timestamp>2009-10-24 15:00:00</timestamp> <passwordData>TGludXggdmVyc2lvbiAyLjYuMTYteGVuVSAoYnVpbGRlckBwYXRjaGJhdC5hbWF6b25zYSkgKGdj</passwordData> </GetPasswordDataResponse>

See Also

For more information about using this API in one of the language-specific AWS SDKs, see the following: