ec2.shop

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kureikain

From time to time, I want a quick tool to help me compare EC2 instances price. https://ec2instances.info/ works great but it's somewhat slow and didn't have a way to just `curl` from terminal.

So I develop this small tool which you can do thing like

    curl https://ec2.shop
    curl https://ec2.shop?region=us-west-2&filter=t2,m4

JimDabell

Are you manually detecting Curl specifically? If I use anything other than Curl, e.g. HTTPie or wget, I get the HTML page, even if I provide an `Accept: text/plain` request header. If I use one of those tools and spoof the Curl user agent string, I get the text/plain response. You should probably just look at the Accept request header, it’s there specifically so clients can tell you what kind of response they want.

kureikain

Great idea.

I just implement it: https://github.com/yeo/ec2.shop/commit/ab258aef3ac2ad3d45b26...

Now by default it's text mode, so request by http client library or tool like curl, wget, httppie all get text bersion.

Only when detecting `Accept` contains `html` and user agent is safari/chrome/firefox etc it send html version.

karmakaze

There should be no reason to check user agent if already checking `Accept`. That's usually more for browser quirks or allow/blocking.

jasonjayr

There should be a new mime type for this: text/x-ansi

gruez

but why "ansi"? ANSI is only an encoding. You can have html that's in ansi, and you can have something like OP's that's not in ansi (eg. if you add emojis).

simedw

Useful tool!

Do you not need to escape the ampersand in the second example? otherwise bash will run it in the background and skip the `filters=t2,m4` part.

bdcravens

Yes, but many terminals will escape it for you if you paste in.

brodouevencode

And it has to be infinitely better than using the pricing API.

tinhspace

Thank you so much. Going to try this one, very useful tool.

kissgyorgy

You can do cool things with this very quickly. For example, I always wondered the price differences between different regions, you can compare two instance prices quickly:

    diff -u <(curl -sS "https://ec2.shop?region=eu-central-1" | grep "t3.large" ) <(curl -sS "https://ec2.shop?region=us-east-1" | grep "t3.large")

echeese

The prices column is sorted lexicographically, instead of numeric, i.e. 1, 10, 2

GlitchMr

This can be dealt with by using a different comparison function, say `.sort((a, b) => a.localeCompare(b, 'en', {numeric: true}))`.

ohashi

They all are

kureikain

I fixed this sorting issue :-). Give it another try.

solatic

Color output seems to be tuned for dark terminal backgrounds. Memory, vCPUs, and Storage are nearly unreadable on a white background.

hnlmorg

I've moaned about this with other CLI tools as well. I wish trend of using RGB values in ANSI escape codes would die because as ugly as the 16*3 colour fields¹ are, they are at least customisable so people can use palettes that suite their terminal and eyesight.

You don't get any such opportunity if the developers hard code the colour values in (and it's worse with a tool like this because you can't even set an environmental variable to change the tools behaviour)

¹ sixteen colours plus bright and dark variants

ASVVVAD

Can you link me to a way to use colours that change with the terminal colour preset? I haven't come across anything like that or maybe didn't pay attention. It would be really helpful

You said you can't even set an env variable to change them so I assume that there is an even better way?

hnlmorg

Wikipedia has a good section on the different methods of describing colour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#3/4_bit

I've got some Go code that you can reuse if you want to the escape codes in Go: https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/utils/ansi/codes....

Just bare in mind that any numbers you see in documentation are sent as ASCII values rather than integers. eg `ESC[31m` (red text) should be sent to the terminal as

    []byte{  // http://www.asciitable.com/
        27,  // ESC character code
        91,  // '['
        51,  // '3'
        49,  // '1'
        109, // 'm'
    }

Though, as you know, most languages will have some syntactic sugar to translate characters to their ASCII values, eg

    'm' == 109
    Asc("m") == 109
    ...etc...

so at least you don't have to write all those values by hand.

kristopolous

On Linux, in X, you can use xresources. Otherwise there's termcap

numlock86

Thanks for the heads up. Colored output in terminal programs is a no go.

kolinkorr839

I have a white background too. Is there a workaround for this?

kureikain

I disable the colorize so it should be your default terminal now.

allis10

Sounds like you played a stupid game and won a stupid prize.

dang

Could you please read and follow the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We're hoping to have a different sort of discussion than internet default here.

shitloadofbooks

I really like this, but the horizontal lines are not helpful at all and just double the number of lines for no benefit.

You can obviously

    curl ec2.shop | grep -v ─

but I'm not sure I want to do that every time and I'm not exactly sure why, but when I do that, I can't select the entire row, only a column at a time (zsh on iTerm 2).

kureikain

I turn off the color :-). And I must say it much nicer without color. Thank you.

anamexis

I also really like this, and have some feedback:

I don't find the colors useful. They aren't contextual at all, it's just certain columns have certain colors, for no apparent reason.

cheeaun

Is this open sourced?

I personally try looking into implementing a curl "interface" to one of my projects, realised that it actually need to check the user-agent (of curl and a plethora of curl alternatives) which I find kind of weird...

codetrotter

> realised that it actually need to check the user-agent

Like someone suggested for the featured page as well, I recommend you make use of the accept header.

For example, assuming your interface is outputting freeform text (since the goal was to have something readable in terminal), you could use something like this:

    Accept: text/vnd.myproject.tui+plain; version=1.0

(Substitute “myproject” with the actual name of your project.)

kureikain

Hey, yes it's 100% open source.

https://github.com/yeo/ec2.shop

The reason it check `curl` agent is because it share the same endpoint (root url) for both of `curl` page and browser version(the one with dropdown, grid etc)

cheeaun

I see, thanks!

soerface

Neat! The prices are without currency symbols - I guess it's always USD? Or maybe dependent on the region…? Would be nice if the $ symbol is printed, and even better if I could see the prices of my european servers in european currency - maybe add a param to select the currency?

It would be very helpful if you would support the `Accept: application/json` header. This way, we could use it in combination with jq to do arbitrary filtering:

    curl -L -H "Accept: application/json" ec2.shop | jq .

YoavR7

Cool! You should probably add http support and not only https. Writing `curl ec2.shop` is easier than `curl https://ec2.shop`

saurik

For HTTPS to truly be meaningful we need to stop supporting HTTP as an on-ramp, to prevent people from just hijacking that initial unencrypted connection and sending anything they want.

Znafon

If you MITM and the user agent send an HTTP request for ec2.shop it does not matter whether the webserver supports HTTP or not, you can send a fake HTTP response either way.

hnlmorg

That was the GPs point.

mschuster91

Anyone who likes to prevent that can submit their site to the HSTS preload list. Chrome, Firefox and Edge use a shared one, the only two relevant other agents (Safari and curl) unfortunately don't though.

flatiron

This is about curl though.

xxpor

(speaking only for myself, not my employer)

I truly do not care if someone goes through the effort to MITM my curl of ec2.shop to inject fake prices or something like that.

There's nothing here that's going to be executed, it'll just be printed or grepped.

In theory you could exploit a 0 day in curl or my terminal or something like that, but I think if you truly think about the risks and tradeoffs here it's really not worth worrying about.

If curl had an hsts list to make this irrelevant that'd also be cool.

toyg

> There's nothing here that's going to be executed

... yet.

Imagine someone using it to find "the biggest size available under $1" and then taking that value to execute some other script.

hnlmorg

These days curl should probably default to https. Or at least give you an environmental variable where you can define the default protocol (libcurl does offer something similar: https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL.html)

throwaway8941

    alias curl='curl --proto-default https'

shawabawa3

curl -L ec2.shop works for just 2 extra chars

baliex

Could you update the `...&filter...` example to wrap the URL in quotes so that the `&` isn't interpretted by the shell as sending the process to the background?

kureikain

Ah crap, yes, going to update it.

elemenophy

this is an issue of ZSH.

hnlmorg

That is a POSIX standard and not something specific to zsh

wolfgang42

No, plain sh also uses the ampersand as a job control operator.

nnx

Interesting tool. Would be really useful if it supported Spot prices, which are even more of a PITA to find using Amazon’s UI.

kureikain

Yes, it isn't that hard to support Spot prices but the price change too often so I have to scrape it for every 5 minutes. Right now, I haven't had the automation to run this yet but it's doable and my pain point too =)

kureikain

Wow, thank you for the feedback. I'm going to implement lot of features suggest in this page.

Since I cannot edit original comment, yes, the site is open source: https://github.com/yeo/ec2.shop

dxxvi

Can I be sure that the prices from this endpoint are accurate (i.e. if Amzn changes the prices, this endpoint will reflect that change)? Off-topic: if I request a spot instance, is there any way (API/cli) to know how much Amzn charges me every hour for that instance?

gen220

I've built something like this in the past (I was running a beefy server for my friends, and wanted them to know how much it was costing us at an hourly rate, before they ran it for 3 weeks straight).

It's definitely possible and not very challenging, but the API Documentation for prices was pretty weak when I built it (a year or two ago, written in Go if it makes a difference). The google cloud prices API was similarly gross. It was kinda fun, but I wouldn't enjoy maintaining that code. In reality, it turns out that $/hour isn't a super straightforward metric (there are many dimensions that go into it), so it's not super straightforward to query.

kureikain

I think the price is accurate. It's fetched directly from this Amazon endpoint. https://github.com/yeo/ec2.shop/blob/master/download.sh#L9

I'm going to add spot instance. Will just need to figure out what URL AWS is fetching

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