Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Getting an activation key for your gateway

To receive an activation key for your gateway, make a web request to the gateway virtual machine (VM). The VM returns a redirect that contains the activation key, which is passed as one of the parameters for the ActivateGateway API action to specify the configuration of your gateway. For more information, see ActivateGateway in the Storage Gateway API Reference.

The request that you make to the gateway VM includes the Amazon Region where the activation occurs. The URL that's returned by the redirect in the response contains a query string parameter called activationkey. This query string parameter is your activation key. The format of the query string looks like the following: http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion=activation_region. The output of this query returns both activation region and key.

The URL also includes vpcEndpoint, the VPC Endpoint ID for gateways that connect using the VPC endpoint type.

Linux (curl)

The following examples show you how to get an activation key using Linux (curl).

Public endpoint

To get an activation key for a public endpoint, use one of the following commands:

Standard endpoints

To get the activation key for a standard endpoint:

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion=region_code&no_redirect"

Dual-stack endpoints

To get the activation key for a dual-stack endpoint:

IPv4

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion&endpointType=DUALSTACK&ipVersion=ipv4&no_redirect"

IPv6

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion&endpointType=DUALSTACK&ipVersion=ipv6&no_redirect"

FIPS endpoints

To get the activation key for a FIPS endpoint:

IPv4

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion&endpointType=FIPS_DUALSTACK&ipVersion=ipv4&no_redirect"

IPv6

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion&endpointType=FIPS_DUALSTACK&ipVersion=ipv6&no_redirect"

VPC endpoints

To get the activation key for a VPC endpoint:

curl "http://gateway_ip_address/?activationRegion=region_code&vpcEndpoint=vpc_endpoint&no_redirect"

Linux (bash/zsh)

The following example shows you how to use Linux (bash/zsh) to fetch the HTTP response, parse HTTP headers, and get the activation key.

  
function get-activation-key() {
  local ip_address=$1
  local activation_region=$2
  if [[ -z "$ip_address" || -z "$activation_region" || -z "$gateway_type" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: get-activation-key ip_address activation_region gateway_type"
    return 1
  fi

  if redirect_url=$(curl -f -s -S -w '%{redirect_url}' "http://$ip_address/?activationRegion=$activation_region&gatewayType=$gateway_type"); then
    activation_key_param=$(echo "$redirect_url" | grep -oE 'activationKey=[A-Z0-9-]+')
    echo "$activation_key_param" | cut -f2 -d=
  else
    return 1
  fi
}

Microsoft Windows PowerShell

The following example shows you how to use Microsoft Windows PowerShell to fetch the HTTP response, parse HTTP headers, and get the activation key.

function Get-ActivationKey {
  [CmdletBinding()]
  Param(
    [parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$IpAddress, 
    [parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$ActivationRegion,
    [parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$GatewayType
  )
  PROCESS {
    $request = Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Uri "http://$IpAddress/?activationRegion=$ActivationRegion&gatewayType=$GatewayType" -MaximumRedirection 0 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($request) {
      $activationKeyParam = $request.Headers.Location | Select-String -Pattern "activationKey=([A-Z0-9-]+)"
      $activationKeyParam.Matches.Value.Split("=")[1]
    }
  }
}

Using your local console

The following examples show you how to use your local console to generate and display an activation key.

Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) based gateways

You can select either standard or FIPS endpoints for gateways based on AL2.

Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) based gateways

For gateways based on AL2023, the following endpoints are available:

For more information, see Endpoint types.