Working with Amazon EC2 key pairs

This Python example shows you how to:

• Get information about your key pairs
• Create a key pair to access an Amazon EC2 instance
• Delete an existing key pair

The scenario

Amazon EC2 uses public–key cryptography to encrypt and decrypt login information. Public–key cryptography uses a public key to encrypt data, then the recipient uses the private key to decrypt the data. The public and private keys are known as a key pair.

In this example, Python code is used to perform several Amazon EC2 key pair management operations. The code uses the AWS SDK for Python to manage IAM access keys using these methods of the EC2 client class:

• describe_key_pairs.
• create_key_pair.
• delete_key_pair.

For more information about the Amazon EC2 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.

All the example code for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Python is available here on GitHub.

Prerequisite tasks

To set up and run this example, you must first configure your AWS credentials, as described in Quickstart.

Describe key pairs

Describe one or more of your key pairs.

The example below shows how to:

• Describe keypairs using describe_key_pairs.

Example

import boto3

ec2 = boto3.client('ec2')
response = ec2.describe_key_pairs()
print(response)

Create a key pair

Create a 2048-bit RSA key pair with the specified name. Amazon EC2 stores the public key and displays the private key for you to save to a file. The private key is returned as an unencrypted PEM encoded PKCS#8 private key. If a key with the specified name already exists, Amazon EC2 returns an error.

The example below shows how to:

• Create a 2048-bit RSA key pair with a specified name using create_key_pair.

Example

import boto3

ec2 = boto3.client('ec2')
response = ec2.create_key_pair(KeyName='KEY_PAIR_NAME')
print(response)

Delete a key pair

Delete the specified key pair, by removing the public key from Amazon EC2.

The example below shows how to:

• Delete a key pair by removing the public key from Amazon EC2 using delete_key_pair.

Example

import boto3

ec2 = boto3.client('ec2')
response = ec2.delete_key_pair(KeyName='KEY_PAIR_NAME')
print(response)