How to get the instance id from within an ec2 instance?

See the EC2 documentation on the subject.

Run:

wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id

If you need programmatic access to the instance ID from within a script,

die() { status=$1; shift; echo "FATAL: $*"; exit $status; }
EC2_INSTANCE_ID="`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id || die \"wget instance-id has failed: $?\"`"

Here is an example of a more advanced use (retrieve instance ID as well as availability zone and region, etc.):

EC2_INSTANCE_ID="`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id || die \"wget instance-id has failed: $?\"`"
test -n "$EC2_INSTANCE_ID" || die 'cannot obtain instance-id'
EC2_AVAIL_ZONE="`wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone || die \"wget availability-zone has failed: $?\"`"
test -n "$EC2_AVAIL_ZONE" || die 'cannot obtain availability-zone'
EC2_REGION="`echo \"$EC2_AVAIL_ZONE\" | sed -e 's:\([0-9][0-9]*\)[a-z]*\$:\\1:'`"

You may also use curl instead of wget, depending on what is installed on your platform.

Use the /dynamic/instance-identity/document URL if you also need to query more than just your instance ID.

wget -q -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document

This will get you JSON data such as this - with only a single request.

{
    "devpayProductCodes" : null,
    "privateIp" : "10.1.2.3",
    "region" : "us-east-1",
    "kernelId" : "aki-12345678",
    "ramdiskId" : null,
    "availabilityZone" : "us-east-1a",
    "accountId" : "123456789abc",
    "version" : "2010-08-31",
    "instanceId" : "i-12345678",
    "billingProducts" : null,
    "architecture" : "x86_64",
    "imageId" : "ami-12345678",
    "pendingTime" : "2014-01-23T45:01:23Z",
    "instanceType" : "m1.small"
}

On Amazon Linux AMIs you can do:

$ ec2-metadata -i
instance-id: i-1234567890abcdef0

Or, on Ubuntu and some other linux flavours, ec2metadata --instance-id (This command may not be installed by default on ubuntu, but you can add it with sudo apt-get install cloud-utils)

As its name suggests, you can use the command to get other useful metadata too.

On Ubuntu you can:

sudo apt-get install cloud-utils

And then you can:

EC2_INSTANCE_ID=$(ec2metadata --instance-id)

You can get most of the metadata associated with the instance this way:

ec2metadata --help
Syntax: /usr/bin/ec2metadata [options]

Query and display EC2 metadata.

If no options are provided, all options will be displayed

Options:
    -h --help               show this help

    --kernel-id             display the kernel id
    --ramdisk-id            display the ramdisk id
    --reservation-id        display the reservation id

    --ami-id                display the ami id
    --ami-launch-index      display the ami launch index
    --ami-manifest-path     display the ami manifest path
    --ancestor-ami-ids      display the ami ancestor id
    --product-codes         display the ami associated product codes
    --availability-zone     display the ami placement zone

    --instance-id           display the instance id
    --instance-type         display the instance type

    --local-hostname        display the local hostname
    --public-hostname       display the public hostname

    --local-ipv4            display the local ipv4 ip address
    --public-ipv4           display the public ipv4 ip address

    --block-device-mapping  display the block device id
    --security-groups       display the security groups

    --mac                   display the instance mac address
    --profile               display the instance profile
    --instance-action       display the instance-action

    --public-keys           display the openssh public keys
    --user-data             display the user data (not actually metadata)