Transfer files to Ubuntu Linux EC2 instances using an SCP client from your computer

In this article, I am going to show you how to transfer files between your local computer and a Linux instance using secure copy protocol (SCP).

Please visit my GitHub Repository for EC2 articles on various topics being updated on constant basis.

Let’s get started!

Objectives:

1. Create a Key Pair temp-KP

2. Create EC2 Security Group launch-wizard-1

3. Create an EC2 Ubuntu instance my-EC2

4. Get the public DNS name of the instance

5. Use SCP to transfer files between your computer to your instance

Pre-requisites:

• AWS user account with admin access, not a root account.

Resources Used:

What is Amazon EC2?

Steps for implementation to this project:

1. Create a Key Pair temp-KP

• Create keypair

2. Create EC2 Security Group launch-wizard-1

• inbound rules

• outbound rules

3. Create an EC2 Ubuntu instance my-EC2

• take defaults

• Launch instance

4. Get the public DNS name of the instance

• ec2-44-212-72-45.compute-1.amazonaws.com

5. Use SCP to transfer files between your computer to your instance

• login to your EC2 instance on a Ubuntu Linux server

• create a file rev.txt

Hello! Welcome
:wq

• change permissions

chmod 777 rev.txt
chown ubuntu/ubuntu rev.txt

• change permissions to your key-pair temp-KP.pem

revjoshi@DESKTOP-9HCK7TO:~$ chmod 400 temp-KP.pem
revjoshi@DESKTOP-9HCK7TO:~$ ls -lt temp-KP.pem
-r-------- 1 revjoshi revjoshi 1674 Aug 13 17:40 temp-KP.pem
revjoshi@DESKTOP-9HCK7TO:~$

• make a directory revjoshi1

• (Public DNS) To transfer a file to the destination on the instance
  

revjoshi@DESKTOP-9HCK7TO:~$ scp -i "temp-KP.pem" /home/revjoshi/rev.txt [e-mail]:/home/ubuntu/
rev.txt                                                                               100%   15     0.9KB/s   00:00
revjoshi@DESKTOP-9HCK7TO:~$

• login to EC2 to check

ssh -i "temp-KP.pem" [e-mail]


ubuntu@ip-172-31-88-165:~$ ls -lt
total 4
-rwxrwxr-x 1 ubuntu ubuntu 15 Aug 13 23:04 rev.txt
ubuntu@ip-172-31-88-165:~$

Cleanup

• delete EC2 instance

What we have done so far

Using SCP, we have successfully transferred a file using the instance's public DNS name from your computer to an EC2 instance.