Amazon ECS container agent configuration

Applies to: EC2 instances

The Amazon ECS container agent supports a number of configuration options, most of which you set through environment variables.

If your container instance was launched with a Linux variant of the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, you can set these environment variables in the /etc/ecs/ecs.config file and then restart the agent. You can also write these configuration variables to your container instances with Amazon EC2 user data at launch time. For more information, see Bootstrapping Amazon ECS Linux container instances to pass data.

If your container instance was launched with a Windows variant of the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, you can set these environment variables with the PowerShell SetEnvironmentVariable command and then restart the agent. For more information, see Run commands when you launch an EC2 instance with user data input in the Amazon EC2 User Guide and Bootstrapping Amazon ECS Windows container instances to pass data.

If you are manually starting the Amazon ECS container agent (for non Amazon ECS-optimized AMIs), you can use these environment variables in the docker run command that you use to start the agent. Use these variables with the syntax --env=VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE. For sensitive information, such as authentication credentials for private repositories, you should store your agent environment variables in a file and pass them all at one time with the --env-file path_to_env_file option. You can use the following commands to add the variables.

sudo systemctl stop ecs
sudo vi /etc/ecs/ecs.config 
# And add the environment variables with VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE format.
sudo systemctl start ecs

Available parameters

For information about the available Amazon ECS container agent configuration parameters, see Amazon ECS Container Agent on GitHub.