Working with Key Pairs in Amazon EC2

The following examples show you how to use the AWS SDK for Ruby with Amazon EC2 to:

For more information about key pairs, see Amazon EC2 Key Pairs in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances or Amazon EC2 Key Pairs and Windows Instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances.

For additional code that you can use to run these examples, see Complete Example.

Create a Key Pair

Call the create_key_pair method, specifying the name of the key pair to create.

  key_pair = ec2.create_key_pair({
    key_name: key_pair_name
  })

In this code:

For more information, see Complete Example.

Get Information about Key Pairs

To get information about a single key pair, use attributes such as:

  puts "Created key pair '#{key_pair.key_name}'."
  puts "\nSHA-1 digest of the DER encoded private key:"
  puts "#{key_pair.key_fingerprint}"
  puts "\nUnencrypted PEM encoded RSA private key:"
  puts "#{key_pair.key_material}"

In this code, key_pair is a variable representing an Aws::EC2::KeyPair object. This is returned by calling the create_key_pair method in the previous example.

To get information about multiple key pairs, call the describe_key_pairs method.

key_pairs_result = ec2.describe_key_pairs()

if key_pairs_result.key_pairs.count > 0
  puts "\nKey pair names:"
  key_pairs_result.key_pairs.each do |kp|
    puts kp.key_name
  end
end

In this code:

For more information, see Complete Example.

Delete a Key Pair

Call the delete_key_pair method, specifying the name of the key pair to delete.

ec2.delete_key_pair({
  key_name: key_pair_name 
})

In this code:

For more information, see Complete Example.

Complete Example

The following code, which you can adapt and run, combines the preceding examples into a single example.

require 'aws-sdk-ec2'  # v2: require 'aws-sdk'

ec2 = Aws::EC2::Client.new(region: 'us-east-1')

key_pair_name = "my-key-pair"

# Create a key pair.
begin
  key_pair = ec2.create_key_pair({
    key_name: key_pair_name
  })
  puts "Created key pair '#{key_pair.key_name}'."
  puts "\nSHA-1 digest of the DER encoded private key:"
  puts "#{key_pair.key_fingerprint}"
  puts "\nUnencrypted PEM encoded RSA private key:"
  puts "#{key_pair.key_material}"
rescue Aws::EC2::Errors::InvalidKeyPairDuplicate
  puts "A key pair named '#{key_pair_name}' already exists."
end

# Get information about Amazon EC2 key pairs.
key_pairs_result = ec2.describe_key_pairs()

if key_pairs_result.key_pairs.count > 0
  puts "\nKey pair names:"
  key_pairs_result.key_pairs.each do |kp|
    puts kp.key_name
  end
end

# Delete the key pair.
ec2.delete_key_pair({
  key_name: key_pair_name 
})

To run this code, you must: