AWSInfo

The AWS Console in your Terminal

awsinfo is a read-only client for AWS written in Bash. It tries to replace the AWS console for getting basic information about your AWS resoures in your CLI. No more opening the AWS Console when all you want to know is basic information about your resources.

Why a read-only AWS Client

When we try to get the most out of AWS by building on top of as many AWS services as possible we regularly have to look up information about our resources. From checking the deploment status of a CloudFormation stack to the number of messages in an SQS Queue, the status of a CodeBuild Project or the number of EC2 instances currently running.

Looking up this information often requires us to go through the AWS Console as the CLI tooling that AWS provides is a great interface to their API, but hard to use for getting an overview on deployed resources quickly. awsinfo provides you with default views, similar to the AWS Console, for various (and growing) AWS services so you can get the most important information. While awsinfo provides you with some access to deeper information on specific services, for the most part once you want to dig really deep other tools like the awscli or aws-shell are great for exploring all the details.

Why Bash

Terminals are the most common piece of tech we all use, regardless of the specific language we prefer. By building awsinfo as a collection of bash scripts you can easily see and understand how it works under the hood. If it doesn’t do exactly what you need it to do you can copy the script, edit it to do exactly what you need and add that to your repository or local bash.

This is much more complicated if this tool were built on any specific programming language as we’d have to understand a lot more of the environment to get it up and running.

Building it with Bash also means we can use the awscli directly which removes a lot of necessary implementation.

Installation

You can run AWSInfo either directly as a script or install through Docker.

Use directly as a script

On OSX you need to make sure that you have a recent version of Bash (>4) and the GNU coreutils installed, specifically greadlink and gdate. You can install them for example with brew install bash coreutils. On Linux this should just work.

After that clone the Repository and either softlink the scripts/awsinfo.bash script or put it in your Path. You can then directly execute the script as it automatically detects the path it was cloned into. For updates just pull from the Repository.

On Linux or Windows Subsystem for Linux, you might want to clone the repo to /usr/local/bin/awsinfo.git or $HOME/bin/awsinfo.git and then cd /usr/local/bin && ln -s awsinfo.git/scripts/awsinfo.bash awsinfo or cd $HOME/bin && ln -s awsinfo.git/scripts/awsinfo.bash awsinfo.

AWSInfo needs the following tools installed on your system:

Using Docker directly

You can use the following command to use the awsinfo Docker container with pure Docker. It will automatically download it and run the container for you with any Arguments you append at the end. It makes the ~/.aws folder accessible as a Volume as well as forwarding all awscli default environment variables.

docker run -it -v ~/.aws:/root/.aws -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY -e AWS_SESSION_TOKEN -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION -e AWS_PROFILE -e AWS_CONFIG_FILE -e AWSINFO_DEBUG theserverlessway/awsinfo ARGUMENTS_FOR_AWSINFO

You can set it up as an alias in your shell config file as well.

alias awsinfo='docker run -it -v ~/.aws:/root/.aws -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY -e AWS_SESSION_TOKEN -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION -e AWS_PROFILE -e AWS_CONFIG_FILE -e AWSINFO_DEBUG theserverlessway/awsinfo'

Whalebrew

If you’re using Whalebrew(Which I highly recommend) simply run the following to install:

whalebrew install theserverlessway/awsinfo

Update

To update the Docker container run docker pull theserverlessway/awsinfo:latest

Usage

awsinfo commands support commands and subcommands, for example you can run awsinfo logs to print log messages or awsinfo logs groups to get a list of all log groups in the current account and region.

To see all supported services check out the following list or run awsinfo commands. You can see all the available commands for a service by running awsinfo commands SERVICE, e.g. awsinfo commands ec2.

You can run any command with --help (e.g. awsinfo logs --help) to see the same help page that is in the repo (and linked below).

Supported Services and Commands

You can list all supported services with awsinfo commands and get a list of all commands per service with awsinfo command SERVICE, e.g. awsinfo command ec2

Following is a list of all available commands and links to their source documentation files that are also used when you call a command with --help

Commands