How to Connect to a pdfRest Self-Hosted EC2 from Windows

PuTTY on Windows Connectivity

The following tutorial is relevant to anyone using PuTTY on Windows to connect to any of the pdfRest Self-Hosted products from the AWS Marketplace, including:

pdfRest API Toolkit Self-Hosted

pdfRest PDF Forms Pro Self-Hosted API

Key Pair File Format

During setup of a pdfRest Self-Hosted product, you are asked to choose an existing Key Pair or create a new one. This Key Pair is distributed in a .PEM format. Many Windows users, using the very popular, open-source PuTTY SSH client encounter issues trying to connect to their AWS instance because PuTTY does not natively support .PEM files. Instead, PuTTY has provided a conversion tool, PuTTYgen, to turn .PEM into .PPK formats.

This issue is so common that AWS has written a very comprehensive guide on connect to Linux-based instances from inside of Windows. The documentation, linked below, should be of help to any pdfRest Self-Hosted customers coming to us from Windows-based environments.

Connect to your Linux instance from Windows with PuTTY - docs.aws.amazon.com

Developer-focused Support

If you have questions about this or any other Self-Hosted product related issues, please reach out to our support team at pdfRest Support.