ec2: kill all my instances from the command line

Question

How can I kill all my instances from the command line. Is there a command for this or must I script it?

Answer 1

As far as I know there isn't an 'all' switch for the ec2-terminate-instances command. So you probably need to script it. It won't be that hard. You only need to generate a comma separated list of your instances.

This is a python script I am using:

import sys
import time
from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection

def main():
    conn = EC2Connection('', '')
    instances = conn.get_all_instances()
    print instances
    for reserv in instances:
     for inst in reserv.instances:
      if inst.state == u'running':
       print "Terminating instance %s" % inst
       inst.stop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

It uses boto library. This is not necessary for the specific task (a simple shell script will be enough), but it may be handy in many occasions.

Finally are you aware of Elasticfox extension for Firefox? This is by far the easiest way to access EC2.

Answer 2

AWS Console and Elasticfox make it pretty easy.

A command-line solution can be achieved in one-line using the EC2 API tools:

for i in `ec2din | grep running | cut -f2`; do ec2kill $i; done