Working with Amazon EC2 key pairs with AWS SDK for PHP Version 3

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.

The following examples show how to:

All the example code for the AWS SDK for PHP is available here on GitHub.

Credentials

Before running the example code, configure your AWS credentials, as described in Credentials. Then import the AWS SDK for PHP, as described in Basic usage.

Create a key pair

Imports

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Sample Code

$ec2Client = new Aws\Ec2\Ec2Client([
    'region' => 'us-west-2',
    'version' => '2016-11-15',
    'profile' => 'default'
]);

$keyPairName = 'my-keypair';

$result = $ec2Client->createKeyPair(array(
    'KeyName' => $keyPairName
));

// Save the private key
$saveKeyLocation = getenv('HOME') . "/.ssh/{$keyPairName}.pem";
file_put_contents($saveKeyLocation, $result['keyMaterial']);

// Update the key's permissions so it can be used with SSH
chmod($saveKeyLocation, 0600);

Delete a key pair

Imports

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Sample Code

$ec2Client = new Aws\Ec2\Ec2Client([
    'region' => 'us-west-2',
    'version' => '2016-11-15',
    'profile' => 'default'
]);

$keyPairName = 'my-keypair';

$result = $ec2Client->deleteKeyPair(array(
    'KeyName' => $keyPairName
));

var_dump($result);

Describe key pairs

Imports

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Sample Code

$ec2Client = new Aws\Ec2\Ec2Client([
    'region' => 'us-west-2',
    'version' => '2016-11-15',
    'profile' => 'default'
]);

$result = $ec2Client->describeKeyPairs();

var_dump($result);