Power tool: aws-shell

The interactive productivity booster for the AWS CLI.

Posted by Mike Apted on Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The AWS CLI can be an incredibly efficient means of interacting with your AWS account, but there is a steep learning curve for beginners and the breadth and depth of functionality can be overwhelming.

Enter aws-shell. It’s an interactive shell that provides cool features like:

  • Auto/tab completion of commands and options as you type
  • Examples of the shorthand syntax for various options
  • Fuzzy searching
  • Integration with your account (for autocompleting instance IDs for example)
  • Inline documentation/help

Note: If you are like me and don’t read the instructions before getting started and you are running El Capitan take note of the need to install with some extra flags:

sudo pip install aws-shell –upgrade –ignore-installed six

This offers both the new and seasoned AWS user a path to AWS CLI mastery and efficiency.