Introduction to AWS CLI

Installing the aws cli

On linux: If you don’t have pip installed, install it first:

curl "https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py" -o "get-pip.py"
sudo python get-pip.py

Then install awscli:

sudo pip install awscli

On Windows: Download the latest installers from here

Configuring the aws cli

Now you have aws cli installed, you’ll have to configure it access your AWS resources. You can have multiple profiles like test, dev, prod, etc profiles. So let’s assume you want to configure it for your test environment.

aws configure --profile=test

It will ask for following information:

AWS Access Key ID [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Default region name [None]: us-west-2
Default output format [None]: json

You will get the above information from IAM management in AWS Console.

Working with aws cli

The best part about aws cli is that you can embed the commands into a script and can trigger them based on some criteria. Like auto deployment on production (in Elastic Beanstalk), no need to go to AWS Console to select and deploy.
You’ll get all the available commands by running:

# This will give all the available commands
aws help

You can even go further, like:

# This will give all the available options for ec2
aws ec2 help

and further

# This will output all the operations you can do with ec2 instances
aws ec2 describe-instances help

You can list/manipulate all the aws resources (S3, EC2, EBS, RDS, etc) using aws cli. Here’s the complete documentation.