Downloading Remote Files with SCP

Today we look at how to pull files from your EC2 instance to your local machine using SCP.

Sometimes you just need a remote file on your local workstation, perhaps to avoid additional installation or avoid additional provisioning of your remote instance.

This procedure is useful for:

• Pulling log files from a remote EC2 instance.
• Pulling OS specific files from a remote EC2 instance.
• General data transfer needs.

1. Login to AWS console.

2. Spin up a AWS EC2 instance with the Amazon Linux 2023 AMI.

3. Connect via EC2 instance connect with a SSH session.

4. Curl a file into the the EC2 instance with the command:

   curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Ian-Fogelman/5b84773e5a1ad7c89fa2203132c36aa8/raw/database_cowboys.txt --output database_cowboys.txt

   This creates a text file database_cowboys.txt in your working directory.

5. Run the command pwd on your SSH session to get the current working directory. This command returns a directory: /home/ec2-user/.

6. On your local workstation use the SCP client to download the file from your EC2 instance:

   • You will need the key pair used when creating the instance to authenticate to your instance typcially a key-pair.pem file.

   • In your terminal use the command: scp -i ec2key.pem ec2-user@12.12.12.12:/home/ec2-user/database_cowboys.txt .

     • This command uses scp to initiate a connection, the -i is the identity file flag which points to ec2key.pem.
     • The ec2-user is the username of your AWS IAM user (defaults to ec2-user).
     • The 12:12:12:12 parameter is the public IPAddress. This can be found on the EC2 dashboard https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-east-1#Instances .
     • The path after : is the working directory and the file name of the file you want to copy, in this cases /home/ec2-user/database_cowboys.txt.
     • The . character specifies the local directory as the target for the transfer.