Yesterday, I was attending a meetup from the great French AWS Users Group, and Henri shows us a great new project where he is working on, it’s called: awless.

awless is a great alternative of the official AWS CLI. It’s written in Go, and available on Apache license on Github.

awless will enhance your experience with CLI with key features like: autocompletion, offline mode (--local), template support, revert capabilities, etc…

Using well-known syntax: subject, verb, complement: it simplifies drastically the daily operations with the CLI, for example:

Examples

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[13:37][Majora][~]$ awless list instances

|        ID ▲         |    ZONE    | NAME |  STATE  |   TYPE   |   PUBLIC IP   |  PRIVATE IP   | UPTIME  |   KEYPAIR    |
|---------------------|------------|------|---------|----------|---------------|---------------|---------|--------------|
| i-0099888399012e5b2 | eu-west-1c |      | running | t2.micro | 52.212.2.1XX  | 172.31.24.233 | 48 secs | myCPFreeTier |
| i-033e57e044e6c8617 | eu-west-1c |      | running | t2.micro | 52.212.84.XX  | 172.31.28.107 | 48 secs | myCPFreeTier |
| i-0402fcfe2ad45c675 | eu-west-1a |      | stopped | t2.micro |               | 172.31.44.109 | 5 weeks | myCPFreeTier |
| i-05c5b1079128cbeae | eu-west-1c |      | running | t2.micro | 34.251.228.XX | 172.31.22.94  | 48 secs | myCPFreeTier |
| i-0cf50db0c11fd023f | eu-west-1c |      | running | t2.micro | 52.30.242.XX  | 172.31.25.192 | 48 secs | myCPFreeTier |
| i-0fea0ce2c684edd15 | eu-west-1c |      | running | t2.micro | 54.72.150.XXX | 172.31.18.180 | 48 secs | myCPFreeTier |

PS: All outputs are markdown compatible.

PS2: Don’t blame me for instances without name tag. :)

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[13:37][Majora][~]$ awless list buckets --aws-region=eu-west-2
|         ID ▲         |                                       GRANTS                                        | CREATED  |
|----------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------|
| zoph-bucket-xxx      | FULL_CONTROL[user:1b7d95b8fef668e805xxxaa0d6dfea0065a93cb14f29b2fc1cc9137d0c2db35e] | 2 months |
|                      | READ[group:http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/AllUsers]                         |          |

Hands on

Let’s stop a simple instance:

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Then, revert this change:

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SSH access to your instances is like Magic 🎉

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Get detailed information about your instance:

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[13:37][Majora][~]$ awless show i-0402fcfe2ad45c675
|    PROPERTY ▲     |        VALUE        |
|-------------------|---------------------|
| Architecture      | x86_64              |
| Hypervisor        | xen                 |
| ID                | i-0402fcfe2ad45c675 |
| Image             | ami-d38ecea0        |
| KeyPair           | myCPFreeTier        |
| NetworkInterfaces | [eni-eadd92b9]      |
| Private IP        | 172.31.44.109       |
| RootDevice        | /dev/sda1           |
| RootDeviceType    | ebs                 |
| SecurityGroups    | [sg-74cb670d]       |
| State             | stopped             |
| Subnet            | subnet-6399db3b     |
| Type              | t2.micro            |
| Uptime            | 5 weeks             |
| Vpc               | vpc-d85163bc        |
| Zone              | eu-west-1a          |

# Relations:
eu-west-1[region]
	↳ vpc-d85163bc[vpc]
		↳ subnet-6399db3b[subnet]
			↳ i-0402fcfe2ad45c675[instance]

Depending on: myCPFreeTier[keypair], @FreeBSD 11-11-0-RELEASE-AutogenByAWSMP-[securitygroup], vol-0c56ec363f41e8089[volume]

Did you notice the Relations section ? Awesome! 👍

Using templates

In this example, I’m running an awless template to setup a WordPress blog in HA from official awless-templates repository

First, list subnets and VPC in your region, answer questions with subnet for instances, and subnets for ELB.

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Then your VPC name (use autocompletion)

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Running template

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And here we go 👏, your Wordpress blog is now up and running

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Conclusion

I think this CLI is clearly impressive despite alpha/beta version, we will need to keep an eye on this development, don’t hesitate to put a star ⭐ on Github or contribute to this project, and thanks, Henri and his great team!

That’s all folks!

zoph.