Macbook/Linux: Secure Copy from your local machine to an EC2 instance

I always forget the syntax of SCP and so this is a short article with a simple example of how to SCP a file from your laptop to your EC2 instance and how to copy it back from EC2 to your laptop:

Copying from Laptop to EC2

scp -i "mylocalpemfile.pem" mylocalfile.zip ec2-user@myEc2DnsOrIpAdress:/home/mydestinationfolder

scp -i identity_file.pem source_file.extention username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path

scp: Secure copy protocol
-i: Identity file
source_file.extension: The file that you want to copy
username: Username of the remote system (ubuntu for Ubuntu, ec2-user for Linux AMI or bitnami for wordpress)
public_ipv4_dns: DNS/IPv4 address of an instance
remote_path: Destination path

Copying from EC2 to your Laptop

scp -i "mylocalpemfile.pem" ec2-user@myEc2DnsOrIpAdress:/home/myEc2Folder/myfile.zip /Users/accountNmae/Dow
nloads

• scp -i identity_file.pem username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path/source_file.extension ~/destination_local_path

Ex: scp -i access.pem bitnami@0.0.0.0:/home/bitnami/temp.txt ~/Documents/destination_dir