Amazon ECS Container Agent

The Amazon ECS Container Agent is a component of Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and is responsible for managing containers on behalf of Amazon ECS.

This repository comes with ECS-Init, which is a systemd based service to support the Amazon ECS Container Agent and keep it running. It is used for systems that utilize systemd as init systems and is packaged as deb or rpm. The source for ECS-Init is available in this repository at ./ecs-init while the packaging is available at ./packaging.

Usage

The best source of information on running this software is the Amazon ECS documentation.

On the Amazon Linux AMI

On the Amazon Linux AMI, we provide an installable RPM which can be used via sudo yum install ecs-init && sudo start ecs. This is the recommended way to run it in this environment.

On Other Linux AMIs

Amazon ECS docs provides deb and rpm packages and instructions to install ECS Container Agent on non-Amazon Linux instances.

The Amazon ECS Container Agent may also be run in a Docker container on an EC2 instance with a recent Docker version installed. Docker images are available in Docker Hub Repository and ECR Public Gallery.

$ # Set up directories the agent uses
$ mkdir -p /var/log/ecs /etc/ecs /var/lib/ecs/data
$ touch /etc/ecs/ecs.config
$ # Set up necessary rules to enable IAM roles for tasks
$ sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.all.route_localnet=1
$ iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 169.254.170.2 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:51679
$ iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -d 169.254.170.2 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 51679
$ # Run the agent
$ docker run --name ecs-agent \
    --detach=true \
    --restart=on-failure:10 \
    --volume=/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    --volume=/var/log/ecs:/log \
    --volume=/var/lib/ecs/data:/data \
    --net=host \
    --env-file=/etc/ecs/ecs.config \
    --env=ECS_LOGFILE=/log/ecs-agent.log \
    --env=ECS_DATADIR=/data/ \
    --env=ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE=true \
    --env=ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE_NETWORK_HOST=true \
    amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest

On Other Linux AMIs when awsvpc networking mode is enabled

For the AWS VPC networking mode, ECS agent requires CNI plugin and dhclient to be available. ECS also needs the ecs-init to run as part of its startup. The following is an example of docker run configuration for running ecs-agent with Task ENI enabled. Note that ECS agent currently only supports cgroupfs for cgroup driver.

$ # Run the agent
$ /usr/bin/docker run --name ecs-agent \
--init \
--restart=on-failure:10 \
--volume=/var/run:/var/run \
--volume=/var/log/ecs/:/log:Z \
--volume=/var/lib/ecs/data:/data:Z \
--volume=/etc/ecs:/etc/ecs \
--volume=/sbin:/host/sbin \
--volume=/lib:/lib \
--volume=/lib64:/lib64 \
--volume=/usr/lib:/usr/lib \
--volume=/usr/lib64:/usr/lib64 \
--volume=/proc:/host/proc \
--volume=/sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup \
--net=host \
--env-file=/etc/ecs/ecs.config \
--cap-add=sys_admin \
--cap-add=net_admin \
--env ECS_ENABLE_TASK_ENI=true \
--env ECS_UPDATES_ENABLED=true \
--env ECS_ENGINE_TASK_CLEANUP_WAIT_DURATION=1h \
--env ECS_DATADIR=/data \
--env ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE=true \
--env ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE_NETWORK_HOST=true \
--env ECS_LOGFILE=/log/ecs-agent.log \
--env ECS_AVAILABLE_LOGGING_DRIVERS='["json-file","awslogs","syslog","none"]' \
--env ECS_LOGLEVEL=info \
--detach \
amazon/amazon-ecs-agent:latest

See also the Advanced Usage section below.

On the ECS Optimized Windows AMI

ECS Optimized Windows AMI ships with a pre-installed PowerShell module called ECSTools to install, configure, and run the ECS Agent as a Windows service. To install the service, you can run the following PowerShell commands on an EC2 instance. To launch into another cluster instead of windows, replace the ‘windows’ in the script below with the name of your cluster.

PS C:\> Import-Module ECSTools
PS C:\> # The -EnableTaskIAMRole option is required to enable IAM roles for tasks.
PS C:\> Initialize-ECSAgent -Cluster 'windows' -EnableTaskIAMRole

Downloading Different Version of ECS Agent

To download different version of ECS Agent, you can do the following:

PS C:\> # use agentVersion = "latest" for the latest available agent version
PS C:\> $agentVersion = "v1.20.4"
PS C:\> Initialize-ECSAgent -Cluster 'windows' -EnableTaskIAMRole -Version $agentVersion

Build ECS Agent from source

Build ECS Agent Image (Linux)

ECS Agent can also be built locally from source on a linux machine. Use the following steps to build ECS Agent

• Get ECS Agent source

  git clone https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent.git

• Build Agent image using release-agent make target

  make release-agent

  This installs the required build dependencies, builds ECS Agent image and saves it at a path ecs-agent-v${AGENT_VERSION}.tar. Load this using

  docker load < ecs-agent-v${AGENT_VERSION}.tar

  Follow the instructions above to continue with the installation

Build and run standalone (Linux)

The Amazon ECS Container Agent may also be run outside of a Docker container as a Go binary. At this time, this is not recommended for production on Linux, but it can be useful for development or easier integration with your local Go tools.

The following commands run the agent outside of Docker:

make gobuild
./out/amazon-ecs-agent

Standalone (Windows)

The Amazon ECS Container Agent may be built by invoking scripts\build_agent.ps1

Scripts (Windows)

The following scripts are available to help develop the Amazon ECS Container Agent on Windows:

• scripts\run-integ-tests.ps1 - Runs all integration tests in the engine and stats packages
• misc\windows-deploy\Install-ECSAgent.ps1 - Install the ECS agent as a Windows service
• misc\windows-deploy\amazon-ecs-agent.ps1 - Helper script to set up the host and run the agent as a process
• misc\windows-deploy\user-data.ps1 - Sample user-data that can be used with the Windows Server 2016 with Containers AMI to run the agent as a process

Build ECS-Init Package (Linux)

ECS-Init package can also be built as a deb or rpm depending on the linux system you are running. Follow instructions at generic-deb-integrated or generic-rpm-integrated to build and install ECS Agent with Init using deb or rpm.

Advanced Usage

The Amazon ECS Container Agent supports a number of configuration options, most of which should be set through environment variables.

Environment Variables

The table below provides an overview of optional environment variables that can be used to configure the ECS agent. See the Amazon ECS developer guide for additional details about how to configure the agent.

Environment Key	Example Value(s)	Description	Default value on Linux	Default value on Windows
ECS_CLUSTER	clusterName	The cluster this agent should check into.	default	default
ECS_RESERVED_PORTS	[22, 80, 5000, 8080]	An array of ports that should be marked as unavailable for scheduling on this container instance.	[22, 2375, 2376, 51678, 51679]	[53, 135, 139, 445, 2375, 2376, 3389, 5985, 5986, 51678, 51679]
ECS_RESERVED_PORTS_UDP	[53, 123]	An array of UDP ports that should be marked as unavailable for scheduling on this container instance.	[]	[]
ECS_ENGINE_AUTH_TYPE	“docker” | “dockercfg”	The type of auth data that is stored in the ECS_ENGINE_AUTH_DATA key.
ECS_ENGINE_AUTH_DATA	See the dockerauth documentation	Docker auth data formatted as defined by ECS_ENGINE_AUTH_TYPE.
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION	<us-west-2>|<us-east-1>|…	The region to be used in API requests as well as to infer the correct backend host.	Taken from Amazon EC2 instance metadata.	Taken from Amazon EC2 instance metadata.
DOCKER_HOST	unix:///var/run/docker.sock	Used to create a connection to the Docker daemon; behaves similarly to this environment variable as used by the Docker client.	unix:///var/run/docker.sock	npipe:////./pipe/docker_engine
ECS_LOGLEVEL	<crit> | <error> | <warn> | <info> | <debug>	The level of detail to be logged.	info	info
ECS_LOGLEVEL_ON_INSTANCE	<none> | <crit> | <error> | <warn> | <info> | <debug>	Can be used to override ECS_LOGLEVEL and set a level of detail that should be logged in the on-instance log file, separate from the level that is logged in the logging driver. If a logging driver is explicitly set, on-instance logs are turned off by default, but can be turned back on with this variable.	none if ECS_LOG_DRIVER is explicitly set to a non-empty value; otherwise the same value as ECS_LOGLEVEL	none if ECS_LOG_DRIVER is explicitly set to a non-empty value; otherwise the same value as ECS_LOGLEVEL
ECS_LOGFILE	/ecs-agent.log	The location where logs should be written. Log level is controlled by ECS_LOGLEVEL.	blank	blank
ECS_CHECKPOINT	<true | false>	Whether to checkpoint state to the DATADIR specified below.	true if ECS_DATADIR is explicitly set to a non-empty value; false otherwise	true if ECS_DATADIR is explicitly set to a non-empty value; false otherwise
ECS_DATADIR	/data/	The container path where state is checkpointed for use across agent restarts. Note that on Linux, when you specify this, you will need to make sure that the Agent container has a bind mount of $ECS_HOST_DATA_DIR/data:$ECS_DATADIR with the corresponding values of ECS_HOST_DATA_DIR and ECS_DATADIR.	/data/	C:\ProgramData\Amazon\ECS\data
ECS_UPDATES_ENABLED	<true | false>	Whether to exit for an updater to apply updates when requested.	false	false
ECS_DISABLE_METRICS	<true | false>	Whether to disable metrics gathering for tasks.	false	false
ECS_POLL_METRICS	<true | false>	Whether to poll or stream when gathering metrics for tasks. Setting this value to true can help reduce the CPU usage of dockerd and containerd on the ECS container instance. See also ECS_POLL_METRICS_WAIT_DURATION for setting the poll interval.	false	false
ECS_POLLING_METRICS_WAIT_DURATION	10s	Time to wait between polling for metrics for a task. Not used when ECS_POLL_METRICS is false. Maximum value is 20s and minimum value is 5s. If user sets above maximum it will be set to max, and if below minimum it will be set to min. As the number of tasks/containers increase, a higher ECS_POLLING_METRICS_WAIT_DURATION value can potentially cause a problem where memory reservation value of ECS cluster reported in metrics becomes unstable due to missing metrics sample at metric collection time. It is recommended to keep this value smaller than 18s. This behavior is only observed on certain OS and platforms.	10s	10s
ECS_PULL_DEPENDENT_CONTAINERS_UPFRONT	<true | false>	Whether to pull images for containers with dependencies before the dependsOn condition has been satisfied.	false	false
ECS_RESERVED_MEMORY	32	Reduction, in MiB, of the memory capacity of the instance that is reported to Amazon ECS. Used by Amazon ECS when placing tasks on container instances. This doesn’t reserve memory usage on the instance.	0	0
ECS_AVAILABLE_LOGGING_DRIVERS	["awslogs","fluentd","gelf","json-file","journald","logentries","splunk","syslog"]	Which logging drivers are available on the container instance.	["json-file","none"]	["json-file","none"]
ECS_DISABLE_PRIVILEGED	true	Whether launching privileged containers is disabled on the container instance.	false	false
ECS_SELINUX_CAPABLE	true	Whether SELinux is available on the container instance. (Limited support; Z-mode mounts only.)	false	false
ECS_APPARMOR_CAPABLE	true	Whether AppArmor is available on the container instance.	false	false
ECS_ENGINE_TASK_CLEANUP_WAIT_DURATION	10m	Default time to wait to delete containers for a stopped task (see also ECS_ENGINE_TASK_CLEANUP_WAIT_DURATION_JITTER). If set to less than 1 second, the value is ignored.	3h	3h
ECS_ENGINE_TASK_CLEANUP_WAIT_DURATION_JITTER	1h	Jitter value for the task engine cleanup wait duration. When specified, the actual cleanup wait duration time for each task will be the duration specified in ECS_ENGINE_TASK_CLEANUP_WAIT_DURATION plus a random duration between 0 and the jitter duration.	blank	blank
ECS_MANIFEST_PULL_TIMEOUT	10m	Timeout before giving up on fetching image manifest for a container image.	1m	1m
ECS_CONTAINER_STOP_TIMEOUT	10m	Instance scoped configuration for time to wait for the container to exit normally before being forcibly killed.	30s	30s
ECS_CONTAINER_START_TIMEOUT	10m	Timeout before giving up on starting a container.	3m	8m
ECS_CONTAINER_CREATE_TIMEOUT	10m	Timeout before giving up on creating a container. Minimum value is 1m. If user sets a value below minimum it will be set to min.	4m	4m
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE	true	Whether to enable IAM Roles for Tasks on the Container Instance	false	false
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE_NETWORK_HOST	true	Whether to enable IAM Roles for Tasks when launched with host network mode on the Container Instance	false	false
ECS_DISABLE_IMAGE_CLEANUP	true	Whether to disable automated image cleanup for the ECS Agent.	false	false
ECS_IMAGE_CLEANUP_INTERVAL	30m	The time interval between automated image cleanup cycles. If set to less than 10 minutes, the value is ignored.	30m	30m
ECS_IMAGE_MINIMUM_CLEANUP_AGE	30m	The minimum time interval between when an image is pulled and when it can be considered for automated image cleanup.	1h	1h
NON_ECS_IMAGE_MINIMUM_CLEANUP_AGE	30m	The minimum time interval between when a non ECS image is created and when it can be considered for automated image cleanup. You will need to also set ECS_ENABLE_UNTRACKED_IMAGE_CLEANUP to true.	1h	1h
ECS_NUM_IMAGES_DELETE_PER_CYCLE	5	The maximum number of images to delete in a single automated image cleanup cycle. If set to less than 1, the value is ignored.	5	5
ECS_IMAGE_PULL_BEHAVIOR	<default | always | once | prefer-cached >	The behavior used to customize the container image and digest pull process. If default is specified, the image/digest will be pulled remotely, if the pull fails then the cached image/digest on the instance will be used. If always is specified, the image/digest will be pulled remotely, if the pull fails then the task will fail. If once is specified, the image/digest will be pulled remotely if it has not been pulled before or if the image was removed by image cleanup, otherwise the cached image/digest on the instance will be used. If prefer-cached is specified, the image/digest will be pulled remotely if there is no cached image, otherwise the cached image/digest in the instance will be used.	default	default
ECS_IMAGE_PULL_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT	1m	The time to wait after docker pulls complete waiting for extraction of a container. Useful for tuning large Windows containers.	1m	3m
ECS_IMAGE_PULL_TIMEOUT	1h	The time to wait for pulling docker image.	2h	2h
ECS_INSTANCE_ATTRIBUTES	{"stack": "prod"}	These attributes take effect only during initial registration. After the agent has joined an ECS cluster, use the PutAttributes API action to add additional attributes. For more information, see Amazon ECS Container Agent Configuration in the Amazon ECS Developer Guide.	{}	{}
ECS_INSTANCE_IP_COMPATIBILITY	ipv4 | ipv6	Option to override Agent’s auto detection of instance’s IP compatibility. When unset, Agent consults the instance’s default IPv4 and IPv6 routes to detect the IP compatibility of the instance. Use this option to override auto detection with the value you provide. For IPv6-only instances, Agent uses dualstack endpoints when making any AWS service calls and sets up features to be IPv6-compatible. For dualstack instances, just use ipv4. Neither this option nor the auto detection of IP compatibility are supported on Windows and Agent always works in IPv4-compatible mode.	Automatic detection based on default routes	Not Supported on Windows
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_ENI	false	Whether to enable task networking for task to be launched with its own network interface	false	Not applicable
ECS_ENABLE_HIGH_DENSITY_ENI	false	Whether to enable high density eni feature when using task networking	true	Not applicable
ECS_CNI_PLUGINS_PATH	/ecs/cni	The path where the cni binary file is located	/amazon-ecs-cni-plugins	Not applicable
ECS_AWSVPC_BLOCK_IMDS	true	Whether to block access to Instance Metadata for Tasks started with awsvpc network mode	false	Not applicable
ECS_AWSVPC_ADDITIONAL_LOCAL_ROUTES	["10.0.15.0/24"]	In awsvpc network mode, traffic to these prefixes will be routed via the host bridge instead of the task ENI	[]	Not applicable
ECS_ENABLE_CONTAINER_METADATA	true	When true, the agent will create a file describing the container’s metadata and the file can be located and consumed by using the container enviornment variable $ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_FILE	false	false
ECS_HOST_DATA_DIR	/var/lib/ecs	The source directory on the host from which ECS_DATADIR is mounted. We use this to determine the source mount path for container metadata files in the case the ECS Agent is running as a container. We do not use this value in Windows because the ECS Agent is not running as container in Windows. On Linux, note that when you specify this, you will need to make sure that the Agent container has a bind mount of $ECS_HOST_DATA_DIR/data:$ECS_DATADIR with the corresponding values of ECS_HOST_DATA_DIR and ECS_DATADIR.	/var/lib/ecs	Not used
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_CPU_MEM_LIMIT	true	Whether to enable task-level cpu and memory limits	true	false
ECS_CGROUP_PATH	/sys/fs/cgroup	The root cgroup path that is expected by the ECS agent. This is the path that accessible from the agent mount.	/sys/fs/cgroup	Not applicable
ECS_CGROUP_CPU_PERIOD	10ms	CGroups CPU period for task level limits. This value should be between 8ms to 100ms	100ms	Not applicable
ECS_AGENT_HEALTHCHECK_HOST	localhost	Override for the ecs-agent container’s healthcheck localhost ip address	localhost	localhost
ECS_ENABLE_CPU_UNBOUNDED_WINDOWS_WORKAROUND	true	When true, ECS will allow CPU unbounded(CPU=0) tasks to run along with CPU bounded tasks in Windows.	Not applicable	false
ECS_ENABLE_MEMORY_UNBOUNDED_WINDOWS_WORKAROUND	true	When true, ECS will ignore the memory reservation parameter (soft limit) to run along with memory bounded tasks in Windows. To run a memory unbounded task, omit the memory hard limit and set any memory reservation, it will be ignored.	Not applicable	false
ECS_TASK_METADATA_RPS_LIMIT	100,150	Comma separated integer values for steady state and burst throttle limits for combined total traffic to task metadata endpoint and agent api endpoint.	40,60	40,60
ECS_SHARED_VOLUME_MATCH_FULL_CONFIG	true	When true, ECS Agent will compare name, driver options, and labels to make sure volumes are identical. When false, Agent will short circuit shared volume comparison if the names match. This is the default Docker behavior. If a volume is shared across instances, this should be set to false.	false	false
ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM	ec2_instance	If ec2_instance is specified, existing tags defined on the container instance will be registered to Amazon ECS and will be discoverable using the ListTagsForResource API. Using this requires that the IAM role associated with the container instance have the ec2:DescribeTags action allowed.	none	none
ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS	{"tag_key": "tag_val"}	The metadata that you apply to the container instance to help you categorize and organize them. Each tag consists of a key and an optional value, both of which you define. Tag keys can have a maximum character length of 128 characters, and tag values can have a maximum length of 256 characters. If tags also exist on your container instance that are propagated using the ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_PROPAGATE_TAGS_FROM parameter, those tags will be overwritten by the tags specified using ECS_CONTAINER_INSTANCE_TAGS.	{}	{}
ECS_ENABLE_UNTRACKED_IMAGE_CLEANUP	true	Whether to allow the ECS agent to delete containers and images that are not part of ECS tasks.	false	false
ECS_EXCLUDE_UNTRACKED_IMAGE	alpine:latest	Comma separated list of imageName:tag of images that should not be deleted by the ECS agent if ECS_ENABLE_UNTRACKED_IMAGE_CLEANUP is enabled.
ECS_DISABLE_DOCKER_HEALTH_CHECK	false	Whether to disable the Docker Container health check for the ECS Agent.	false	false
ECS_NVIDIA_RUNTIME	nvidia	The Nvidia Runtime to be used to pass Nvidia GPU devices to containers.	nvidia	Not Applicable
ECS_ALTERNATE_CREDENTIAL_PROFILE	default	An alternate credential role/profile name.	default	default
ECS_ENABLE_SPOT_INSTANCE_DRAINING	true	Whether to enable Spot Instance draining for the container instance. If true, if the container instance receives a spot interruption notice, agent will set the instance’s status to DRAINING, which gracefully shuts down and replaces all tasks running on the instance that are part of a service. It is recommended that this be set to true when using spot instances.	false	false
ECS_LOG_ROLLOVER_TYPE	size | hourly	Determines whether the container agent logfile will be rotated based on size or hourly. By default, the agent logfile is rotated based on size.	size	size
ECS_LOG_OUTPUT_FORMAT	logfmt | json	Determines the log output format. When the json format is used, each line in the log would be a structured JSON map.	logfmt	logfmt
ECS_LOG_MAX_FILE_SIZE_MB	5	When the ECS_LOG_ROLLOVER_TYPE variable is set to size, this variable determines the maximum size (in MB) the log file before it is rotated. If the rollover type is set to hourly then this variable is ignored.	5	5
ECS_LOG_MAX_ROLL_COUNT	24	Determines the number of rotated log files to keep. Older log files are deleted once this limit is reached.	24	24
ECS_LOG_DRIVER	awslogs | fluentd | gelf | json-file | journald | logentries | syslog | splunk	The logging driver to be used by the Agent container.	json-file	Not applicable
ECS_LOG_OPTS	{"option":"value"}	The options for configuring the logging driver set in ECS_LOG_DRIVER.	{}	Not applicable
ECS_ENABLE_AWSLOGS_EXECUTIONROLE_OVERRIDE	true	Whether to enable awslogs log driver to authenticate via credentials of task execution IAM role. Needs to be true if you want to use awslogs log driver in a task that has task execution IAM role specified. When using the ecs-init RPM with version equal or later than V1.16.0-1, this env is set to true by default.	false	false
ECS_FSX_WINDOWS_FILE_SERVER_SUPPORTED	true	Whether FSx for Windows File Server volume type is supported on the container instance. This variable is only supported on agent versions 1.47.0 and later.	false	true
ECS_ENABLE_RUNTIME_STATS	true	Determines if pprof is enabled for the agent. If enabled, the different profiles can be accessed through the agent’s introspection port (e.g. curl http://localhost:51678/debug/pprof/heap > heap.pprof). In addition, agent’s runtime stats are logged to /var/log/ecs/runtime-stats.log file.	false	false
ECS_EXCLUDE_IPV6_PORTBINDING	true	Determines if agent should exclude IPv6 port binding using default network mode. If enabled, IPv6 port binding will be filtered out, and the response of DescribeTasks API call will not show tasks’ IPv6 port bindings, but it is still included in Task metadata endpoint.	false if the container instance is IPv6-only, true otherwise	true
ECS_WARM_POOLS_CHECK	true	Whether to ensure instances going into an EC2 Auto Scaling group warm pool are prevented from being registered with the cluster. Set to true only if using EC2 Autoscaling	false	false
ECS_SKIP_LOCALHOST_TRAFFIC_FILTER	false	By default, the ecs-init service adds an iptable rule to drop non-local packets to localhost if they’re not part of an existing forwarded connection or DNAT, and removes the rule upon stop. If this is set to true, the rule will not be added or removed.	false	false
ECS_ALLOW_OFFHOST_INTROSPECTION_ACCESS	true	By default, the ecs-init service adds an iptable rule to block access to the agent introspection port from off-host (or containers in awsvpc network mode), and removes the rule upon stop. If this is set to true, the rule will not be added or removed	false	false
ECS_ENABLE_GPU_SUPPORT	true	Whether you use container instances with GPU support. This parameter is specified for the agent. You must also configure your task definitions for GPU. For more information, see working with Amazon ECS task definitions for GPU workloads.	false	Not applicable
HTTP_PROXY	10.0.0.131:3128	The hostname (or IP address) and port number of an HTTP proxy to use for the Amazon ECS agent to connect to the internet. For example, this proxy will be used if your container instances do not have external network access through an Amazon VPC internet gateway or NAT gateway or instance. If this variable is set, you must also set the NO_PROXY variable to filter Amazon EC2 instance metadata and Docker daemon traffic from the proxy.	null	null
NO_PROXY	<For Linux: 169.254.169.254,169.254.170.2,/var/run/docker.sock | For Windows: 169.254.169.254,169.254.170.2,\.\pipe\docker_engine>	The HTTP traffic that should not be forwarded to the specified HTTP_PROXY. You must specify 169.254.169.254,/var/run/docker.sock to filter Amazon EC2 instance metadata and Docker daemon traffic from the proxy.	null	null
ECS_GMSA_SUPPORTED	true	Whether you use gMSA authentication to Active Directory in tasks. Each task must specify the location of a credential specification file in the dockerSecurityOpts parameter of a container definition. On Linux, this requires the credentials-fetcher daemon.	false	false
CREDENTIALS_FETCHER_HOST	unix:///var/credentials-fetcher/socket/credentials_fetcher.sock	Used to create a connection to the credentials-fetcher daemon; to support gMSA on Linux. The default is fine for most users, only needs to be modified if user is configuring a custom credentials-fetcher socket path, ie, CF_UNIX_DOMAIN_SOCKET_DIR.	unix:///var/credentials-fetcher/socket/credentials_fetcher.sock	Not Applicable
CREDENTIALS_FETCHER_SECRET_NAME_FOR_DOMAINLESS_GMSA	secretmanager-secretname	Used to support scaling option for gMSA on Linux credentials-fetcher daemon. If user is configuring gMSA on a non-domain joined instance, they need to create an Active Directory user with access to retrieve principals for the gMSA account and store it in secrets manager	secretmanager-secretname	Not Applicable
ECS_DYNAMIC_HOST_PORT_RANGE	100-200	This specifies the dynamic host port range that the agent uses to assign host ports from, for container ports mapping. If there are no available ports in the range for containers, including customer containers and Service Connect Agent containers (if Service Connect is enabled), service deployments would fail.	Defined by /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range	49152-65535
ECS_TASK_PIDS_LIMIT	100	Specifies the per-task pids limit cgroup setting for each task launched on the container instance. This setting maps to the pids.max cgroup setting at the ECS task level. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html#pid. If unset, pids will be unlimited. Min value is 1 and max value is 4194304 (410241024)	unset	Not Supported on Windows
ECS_EBSTA_SUPPORTED	true	Whether to use the container instance with EBS Task Attach support. This variable is set properly by ecs-init. Its value indicates if correct environment to support EBS volumes by instance has been set up or not. ECS only schedules EBSTA tasks if this feature is supported by the platform type. Check EBS Volume considerations for other EBS support details	true	Not Supported on Windows
ECS_ENABLE_FIRELENS_ASYNC	true	Whether the log driver connects to the Firelens container in the background.	true	true
ECS_DETAILED_OS_FAMILY	debian_11	Sets detailed OS information for Linux-based ECS instances by parsing /etc/os-release. This variable is set properly by ecs-init during system initialization.	linux	Not supported on Windows
ECS_PAUSE_LABELS	{"test.pause.label.1":"value1","test.pause.label.2":"value2"}	The labels to add to the pause container.

Additionally, the following environment variable(s) can be used to configure the behavior of the ecs-init service. When using ECS-Init, all env variables, including the ECS Agent variables above, are read from path /etc/ecs/ecs.config: | Environment Variable Name | Example Value(s) | Description | Default value | |:—————-|:—————————-|:————|:———————–| | ECS_SKIP_LOCALHOST_TRAFFIC_FILTER | <true | false> | By default, the ecs-init service adds an iptable rule to drop non-local packets to localhost if they’re not part of an existing forwarded connection or DNAT, and removes the rule upon stop. If ECS_SKIP_LOCALHOST_TRAFFIC_FILTER is set to true, this rule will not be added/removed. | false | | ECS_ALLOW_OFFHOST_INTROSPECTION_ACCESS | <true | false> | By default, the ecs-init service adds an iptable rule to block access to ECS Agent’s introspection port from off-host (or containers in awsvpc network mode), and removes the rule upon stop. If ECS_ALLOW_OFFHOST_INTROSPECTION_ACCESS is set to true, this rule will not be added/removed. | false | | ECS_OFFHOST_INTROSPECTION_INTERFACE_NAME | eth0 | Primary network interface name to be used for blocking offhost agent introspection port access. By default, this value is eth0 | eth0 | | ECS_AGENT_LABELS | {"test.label.1":"value1","test.label.2":"value2"} | The labels to add to the ECS Agent container. | | | ECS_AGENT_APPARMOR_PROFILE | unconfined | Specifies the name of the AppArmor profile to run the ecs-agent container under. This only applies to AppArmor-enabled systems, such as Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE. If unset, defaults to the profile written out by ecs-init (ecs-agent-default). | ecs-agent-default | | ECS_AGENT_PID_NAMESPACE_HOST | <true | false> | By default, the ECS agent container runs with its own PID namespace. If ECS_AGENT_PID_NAMESPACE_HOST is set to true, ecs-init will start the ECS agent container with the host’s PID namespace. This is particularly useful when running on SELinux-enforcing hosts with Docker’s SELinux option enabled. | false |

Persistence

When you run the Amazon ECS Container Agent in production, its datadir should be persisted between runs of the Docker container. If this data is not persisted, the agent registers a new container instance ARN on each launch and is not able to update the state of tasks it previously ran.

Flags

The agent also supports the following flags:

• -k — The agent will not require valid SSL certificates for the services that it communicates with. We recommend against using this flag.
• -loglevel — Options: [<crit>|<error>|<warn>|<info>|<debug>]. The agent will output on stdout at the given level. This is overridden by the ECS_LOGLEVEL environment variable, if present.

Make Targets (on Linux)

The following targets are available. Each may be run with make <target>.

Make Target	Description
release-agent	(Default Agent build) Builds Agent fetching required dependencies and saves image .tar to disk
generic-rpm-integrated	Builds init rpm package and saves .rpm package to disk
generic-deb-integrated	Builds init deb package and saves .deb package to disk
release	(Legacy Agent build) Builds the agent within a Docker container and packages it into a scratch-based image
gobuild	Runs a normal go build of the agent and stores the binary in ./out/amazon-ecs-agent
static	Runs go build to produce a static binary in ./out/amazon-ecs-agent
test	Runs all unit tests using go test
test-in-docker	Runs all tests inside a Docker container
run-integ-tests	Runs all integration tests in the engine and stats packages
clean	Removes build artifacts. Note: this does not remove Docker images
gomod	Update go module dependencies in this repository

Contributing

Contributions and feedback are welcome! Proposals and pull requests will be considered and responded to. For more information, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

If you have a bug/and issue around the behavior of the ECS agent, please open it here.

If you have a feature request, please open it over at the AWS Containers Roadmap.

Amazon Web Services does not currently provide support for modified copies of this software.

Security disclosures

If you think you’ve found a potential security issue, please do not post it in the Issues. Instead, please follow the instructions here or email AWS security directly.

License

The Amazon ECS Container Agent is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.