Amazon EC2 not working with user data php

Question

I am launching a ubuntu EC2 instance with my PHP code and passing user data to it. I don't own that instance.. but they provide user level access to it.

Firstly i tried to run a particular job by passing user data, but it did not seem to work.

I made it very simple and send "touch test.txt" as user data. The instance was launched properly but the file was not created as should be i guess.

Am I missing any step? I checked that file was not created using ssh 'ing to the instance. One thing was i was not in root user at instance. Will that effect anything?

<?php
error_reporting(-1);
header("Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");
require_once '../sdk.class.php';
// Instantiate the class
$ec2 = new AmazonEC2();
$userdata2="touch hi".".txt";
echo $userdata2;
$response = $ec2->run_instances('ami-5f21e236', 1, 1,
array('KeyName' => 'radix2'),
array('UserData' => $userdata2),
array('InstanceType' => 'm1.small')
);
var_dump($response->isOK());
?>

Thanks for the help Eric

@ceejayoz Leaving a comment like that without mentioning migration encourages cross-posting, which is not desired. — Shane Madden
– Shane Madden, Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 22:12
"copy-pasting a question across sites with no changes is considered abusive behavior". So please don't do that. Don't cross-post unless you've carefully tailored your question for each site. If you post, don't get a good answer, and think your question would do better on another site, flag it and ask to have it migrated. — freiheit
– freiheit, Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 22:25
sorry i am new to this.. the guy above said to post this to ServerFault so i did.. won't happen again — amitchhajer
– amitchhajer, Commented Jan 22, 2012 at 14:10

Eric Hammond · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-21 19:59:59Z

2

If you are trying to run your code as a user-data script, then you need to start the user data with the two characters #!

For example, your touch command might be:

#!/bin/bash
touch /tmp/hello-world.txt

I'm not a PHP programmer, but I think this might work based on my research:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
[...your code here...]
?>

Here's the article where I introduced the concept of user-data scripts:

http://alestic.com/2009/06/ec2-user-data-scripts

This has been incorporated into Ubuntu's cloud-init package which is used by a number of AMI distros including Ubuntu and Amazon Linux.

cloud-init has some more flexible ways of specifying things at startup, but the shabang (#!) method is a simple way to run any script at first boot.

answered Jan 21, 2012 at 19:59

Eric Hammond

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2 Comments

amitchhajer Over a year ago

Few things i tried as you said.. $userdata2="#!/bin/bash touch /tmp/hello-world."."txt"; and also putting #!/usr/bin/php before starting php code.. but none combination of them worked. I wanted to know the userdata passed to EC2 is run in bash? if so my userdata should work.. but i cannot see any file being created as i said, checking by ssh.

Eric Hammond Over a year ago

You'll need to include the newlines just like you would in a command line script. You might want to create the file, test it, then pitas the file in as a user data file (instead of a user data string)

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