Download an Amazon EC2 AMI?

amazon-ec2 ec2-ami ec2-api-tools
AndyL picture AndyL · Oct 8, 2010 · Viewed 56.2k times · Source

I would like to download a public Amazon EC2 AMI, such as this one (Ubuntu Lucid), so that I can programmatically extract its contents.

How do I do this? I suspect there is an S3 address somewhere? This blog post looks like it once described this process, but the link seems to no longer work.

So far I can only find explanations of how to move around EC2 instance within AWS. I believe manifest files are an important piece of the puzzle.

Answer

ken picture ken · Jun 18, 2014

Use the ec2-download-bundle in the AMI Tools to download AMIs. Create an instance, then immediately create an AMI. Use ec2-download-bundle to retrieve and decrypt the AMI.

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