Update Gandi.net DNS on Amazon EC2 server boot up

Cloud servers get often randomly picked public IP when they are booted up.  Here is a script can be used to update the Gandi.net DNS records automatically on EC2 server startup.

Step 1. Get API key

Activate and get your Gandi.net API key with  these instructions.  Also, ensure that your Zone file for the domain is updatable. Usually this means that you’ve made copy of the template Zone file.

Step 2. Configure

Download update_domain.py python script and fill in your domain details and the Gandi.net API key.

# CONFIGURATION
DOMAIN = "yourdomain.com" # the domain name to update
NAMES  = ["@", "www"]     # A record names to update
API_KEY= '*********'      # fill in gandi API key

Configuration above would update IP for records ‘yourdomain.com’ and ‘www.yourdomain.com’.

You can also redefine the function ‘resolve_ip’ to adapt the script for other environments than EC2. Current implementation uses EC2’s internal REST API to query instances public IP.

Step 3. Run and test

Run the script on the EC2 server, it should resolve the local IP, Zone file and check if records need to be updated.

$ python update_domain.py

Script does dry run by default and will not update records, set DRY_RUN flag to False to update the records for real.

DRY_RUN = False          # Set false to actually modify Zone

Step 4. Run on boot up

When you’re satisfied with the settings and tested script manually, run command ‘crontab -e’ and add the following entry.

@reboot python /home/ubuntu/update_domain.py

Cron will now run the script on every reboot.