Identify AL2 instances - Amazon Linux 2
Identify Amazon Linux images
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).

Identify AL2 instances

The following information describes how to identify an AL2 instance from another Amazon Linux version or other Linux distribution.

Identify Amazon Linux images

Each image contains a unique /etc/image-id file that identifies it. This file contains the following information about the image:

  • image_name, image_version, image_arch – Values from the build recipe that Amazon used to construct the image.

  • image_stamp – A unique, random hex value generated during image creation.

  • image_date – The UTC time of image creation, in YYYYMMDDhhmmss format.

  • recipe_name, recipe_id – The name and ID of the build recipe Amazon used to construct the image.

Amazon Linux contains an /etc/system-release file that specifies the current release that is installed. This file is updated using yum and is part of the system-release RPM Package Manager (RPM).

Amazon Linux also contains a machine-readable version of /etc/system-release that follows the Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) specification; see /etc/system-release-cpe.

AL2

The following is an example of /etc/image-id for the current version of AL2.

[ec2-user ~]$ cat /etc/image-id
      image_name="amzn2-ami-hvm"
image_version="2"
image_arch="x86_64"
image_file="amzn2-ami-hvm-2.0.20180810-x86_64.xfs.gpt"
image_stamp="8008-2abd"
image_date="20180811020321"
recipe_name="amzn2 ami"
recipe_id="c652686a-2415-9819-65fb-4dee-9792-289d-1e2846bd"

The following is an example of /etc/system-release for the current version of AL2.

[ec2-user ~]$ cat /etc/system-release
      AL2

The following is an example of /etc/os-release for AL2.

[ec2-user ~]$ cat /etc/os-release
NAME="Amazon Linux"
VERSION="2"
ID="amzn"
ID_LIKE="centos rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="2"
PRETTY_NAME="Amazon Linux 2"
ANSI_COLOR="0;33"
CPE_NAME="cpe:2.3:o:amazon:amazon_linux:2"
HOME_URL="https://amazonlinux.com/"

Amazon Linux AMI

The following is an example of /etc/image-id for the current Amazon Linux AMI.

[ec2-user ~]$ cat /etc/image-id
      image_name="amzn-ami-hvm"
image_version="2018.03"
image_arch="x86_64"
image_file="amzn-ami-hvm-2018.03.0.20180811-x86_64.ext4.gpt"
image_stamp="cc81-f2f3"
image_date="20180811012746"
recipe_name="amzn ami"
recipe_id="5b283820-dc60-a7ea-d436-39fa-439f-02ea-5c802dbd"

The following is an example of /etc/system-release for the current Amazon Linux AMI.

[ec2-user ~]$ cat /etc/system-release
      Amazon Linux AMI release 2018.03