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awslabs/aws-shell

★ 7,344PythonAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

TLDR

An interactive terminal tool that wraps the AWS command-line interface with auto-completion, inline documentation, and real-time lookup of your actual AWS resources as you type.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((aws-shell))
    What it does
      AWS CLI wrapper
      Auto-completion
      Inline docs
    Features
      Resource lookup
      Fuzzy search
      Command history
      Session save
    Tech Stack
      Python
      pip
    Audience
      DevOps engineers
      Cloud developers
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Manage AWS resources from the terminal with auto-complete suggestions for instance IDs, bucket names, and IAM users without looking them up separately.

USE CASE 2

Learn AWS CLI commands faster by reading inline documentation that appears as you type each option.

USE CASE 3

Save a terminal session's AWS commands to a file and reuse them as a shell script.

Tech stack

Pythonpip

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Requires Python and pip, reuses existing AWS CLI credentials, no separate configuration needed.

The explanation does not mention the license.

In plain English

aws-shell is an interactive terminal tool that makes it easier to work with Amazon Web Services from the command line. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is a cloud platform that lets you rent computing resources, storage, databases, and other infrastructure. The standard way to control AWS from a terminal is through the AWS CLI, a command-line tool. aws-shell wraps that experience with a more helpful interface. The main feature is auto-completion: as you type a command, the shell suggests matching options and fills in correct values. It also does server-side completion, which means it can look up real resources in your AWS account, like EC2 instance IDs, database table names, S3 bucket names, and IAM user names, and suggest them as you type. This saves you from needing to copy and paste IDs or look them up separately. Fuzzy searching is also supported, so you can type a few letters from a command name and the shell will find the closest match. As you type, inline documentation appears automatically, showing you what each option does without needing to open a separate browser tab. A full documentation panel can be focused using F9. The shell also keeps a history of commands you have run, which you can scroll through using arrow keys, and it supports saving your session's commands to a file using the .edit command so you can turn them into a reusable script. The bottom toolbar includes toggles for fuzzy versus substring matching, VI versus Emacs key bindings, and layout options. Your preferences are saved between sessions. Installation requires Python and pip, the standard Python package manager. Once installed, you run aws-shell from the terminal and it uses the same credentials and configuration as the regular AWS CLI. The project was created by AWS Labs, the open-source arm of Amazon Web Services.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I just installed aws-shell. Walk me through listing my EC2 instances and stopping one using the auto-complete feature instead of memorizing the exact command flags.
Prompt 2
How do I use aws-shell to find the correct S3 bucket name from my account and copy a local file to it in one session?
Prompt 3
I want to use aws-shell to look up my RDS database table names without leaving the terminal. What commands should I run?
Prompt 4
Show me how to save my aws-shell session commands to a script file using the .edit command and then run that script later.
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