[amazon-ec2] How to get the instance id from within an ec2 instance?

Alternative approach for PHP:

$instance = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document'),true);
$id = $instance['instanceId'];
print_r($instance);

That will provide a lot of data about the instance, all nicely packed in an array, no external dependencies. As it's a request that never failed or delayed for me it should be safe to do it that way, otherwise I'd go for curl()