Question 18553 in Amazon Web Sevices Question posted in
The official Amazon Web Services documentation can be found here.

Can anyone confirm if http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/attributes/terraform is a real ec2 meta-data endpoint? – Amazon Web Sevices

I was recently testing ChatGPT on terraform scripts and came across something that I can’t tell if it’s a GPT "cannon fodder" or if this is an undocumented feature.

On a trained ChatGPT session I input:

generate a bash script that can use random_pet resources from terraform

And this was the output:

#!/bin/bash

# Download metadata for the random_pet resource from the Terraform state file
metadata=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/attributes/terraform)

# Parse the metadata and extract the value of the "id" attribute
id=$(echo $metadata | jq -r '.random_pet_generator_id')

# Use the value of the "id" attribute in your Bash script
echo "Hello, $id!"

This looked bogus to me:

http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/attributes/terraform

Until I read about Referring to Alternate Provider Configurations

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2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    @Marcin, I'm pretty sure that's not a real endpoint but hidden features are always a possibility. I ended up with:

    foo.tf

      # Enables access to instance tags from the instance metadata service.
  metadata_options {
    instance_metadata_tags = "enabled"
    http_endpoint          = "enabled"
  }

  # Apply tags to the resources during launch (does not include default_tags)
  dynamic "tag_specifications" {
    for_each = toset(["instance", "volume", "network-interface"])
    content {
      resource_type = tag_specifications.key
      tags = {
        baz = random_pet.generator.id
      }
    }
  }

    bar.sh

    BAZ_TAG=$(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/tags/instance/baz)

    I'm really curious how ChatGPT derived that endpoint. It definitely makes mistakes sometimes but even the mistakes are based on some element of truth.


  2. 0

    There is no terraform value in EC2 metadata. For the valid values please check Instance metadata categories – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

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