The concept of DynDNS assigns a DNS-entry to a frequently changing IP-address. This is done, because a DNS-name can be recognized more easily than an IP-address. For this approach, you can use the AWS-service Route 53, as its purpose is to manage DNS-entries.

Setup environment

For the commands to work correctly, you need to install cli53. You can either install the release-version via pip or the source-version from the GitHub-repository. As there’s currently a small bug around the hosted zone export functionality, I would advise to use the source-version.

Installation of source-version

$ sudo pip install git+git://github.com/barnybug/cli53

Installation of release-version

$ sudo pip install cli53

Update IP-address

For this concept, only a few commands are needed. However, if you still prefer a Bash-script version, it can be found here on GitHub.

NOTE: I assume that you have already setup your hosted zone properly. If you need some help with it, there’s also a blog-post on ‘Register a domain with Route 53’.

The values that need to get adjusted are the DOMAIN and HOSTNAME. For the HOSTNAME you can also leave it as it is. That just uses the short-version of your current hostname. As we need to find out, which external IP-address we currently have, you need to start a dig-call. This can also get modified to a STUN-call.

$ # settings
$ HOSTNAME=$(hostname -s)
$ DOMAIN="aws-blog.io"
$ # get external ip-address
$ ip_address=$(dig -4 @resolver1.opendns.com -t a myip.opendns.com +short)
$ # update dns-entry
$ cli53 rrcreate $DOMAIN $HOSTNAME A $ip_address --ttl 120 --replace