Get help with the Amazon CLI - Amazon Command Line Interface
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This documentation is for Version 1 of the Amazon CLI only. For documentation related to Version 2 of the Amazon CLI, see the Version 2 User Guide.

Get help with the Amazon CLI

This topic describes how to access help content for the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI).

The built-in Amazon CLI help command

You can get help with any command when using the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI). To do so, simply type help at the end of a command name.

For example, the following command displays help for the general Amazon CLI options and the available top-level commands.

$ aws help

The following command displays the available Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) specific commands.

$ aws ec2 help

The following example displays detailed help for the Amazon EC2 DescribeInstances operation. The help includes descriptions of its input parameters, available filters, and what is included as output. It also includes examples showing how to type common variations of the command.

$ aws ec2 describe-instances help

The help for each command is divided into six sections:

Name

The name of the command.

NAME describe-instances -
Description

A description of the API operation that the command invokes.

DESCRIPTION Describes one or more of your instances. If you specify one or more instance IDs, Amazon EC2 returns information for those instances. If you do not specify instance IDs, Amazon EC2 returns information for all relevant instances. If you specify an instance ID that is not valid, an error is returned. If you specify an instance that you do not own, it is not included in the returned results. ...
Synopsis

The basic syntax for using the command and its options. If an option is shown in square brackets, it's optional, has a default value, or has an alternative option that you can use.

SYNOPSIS describe-instances [--dry-run | --no-dry-run] [--instance-ids <value>] [--filters <value>] [--cli-input-json <value>] [--starting-token <value>] [--page-size <value>] [--max-items <value>] [--generate-cli-skeleton]

For example, describe-instances has a default behavior that describes all instances in the current account and Amazon Region. You can optionally specify a list of instance-ids to describe one or more instances; dry-run is an optional Boolean flag that doesn't take a value. To use a Boolean flag, specify either shown value, in this case --dry-run or --no-dry-run. Likewise, --generate-cli-skeleton doesn't take a value. If there are conditions on an option's use, they are described in the OPTIONS section, or shown in the examples.

Options

A description of each of the options shown in the synopsis.

OPTIONS --dry-run | --no-dry-run (boolean) Checks whether you have the required permissions for the action, without actually making the request, and provides an error response. If you have the required permissions, the error response is DryRun- Operation . Otherwise, it is UnauthorizedOperation . --instance-ids (list) One or more instance IDs. Default: Describes all your instances. ...
Examples

Examples showing the usage of the command and its options. If no example is available for a command or use case that you need, request one using the feedback link on this page, or in the Amazon CLI command reference on the help page for the command.

EXAMPLES To describe an Amazon EC2 instance Command: aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids i-5203422c To describe all instances with the instance type m1.small Command: aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "Name=instance-type,Values=m1.small" To describe all instances with an Owner tag Command: aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "Name=tag-key,Values=Owner" ...
Output

Descriptions of each of the fields and data types included in the response from Amazon.

For describe-instances, the output is a list of reservation objects, each of which contains several fields and objects that contain information about the instances associated with it. This information comes from the API documentation for the reservation data type used by Amazon EC2.

OUTPUT Reservations -> (list) One or more reservations. (structure) Describes a reservation. ReservationId -> (string) The ID of the reservation. OwnerId -> (string) The ID of the Amazon account that owns the reservation. RequesterId -> (string) The ID of the requester that launched the instances on your behalf (for example, Amazon Management Console or Auto Scaling). Groups -> (list) One or more security groups. (structure) Describes a security group. GroupName -> (string) The name of the security group. GroupId -> (string) The ID of the security group. Instances -> (list) One or more instances. (structure) Describes an instance. InstanceId -> (string) The ID of the instance. ImageId -> (string) The ID of the AMI used to launch the instance. State -> (structure) The current state of the instance. Code -> (integer) The low byte represents the state. The high byte is an opaque internal value and should be ignored. ...

When the Amazon CLI renders the output into JSON, it becomes an array of reservation objects, similar to the following example.

{ "Reservations": [ { "OwnerId": "012345678901", "ReservationId": "r-4c58f8a0", "Groups": [], "RequesterId": "012345678901", "Instances": [ { "Monitoring": { "State": "disabled" }, "PublicDnsName": "ec2-52-74-16-12.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com", "State": { "Code": 16, "Name": "running" }, ...

Each reservation object contains fields describing the reservation and an array of instance objects, each with its own fields (for example, PublicDnsName) and objects (for example, State) that describe it.

Windows users

You can pipe (|) the output of the help command to the more command to view the help file one page at a time. Press the space bar or PgDn to view more of the document, and q to quit.

C:\> aws ec2 describe-instances help | more

Amazon CLI reference guide

The help files contain links that cannot be viewed or navigated to from the command line. You can view and interact with these links by using the online Amazon CLI version 1 reference guide. The reference also contains the help content for all Amazon CLI commands. The descriptions are presented for easy navigation and viewing on mobile, tablet, or desktop screens.

API documentation

All commands in the Amazon CLI correspond to requests made to an Amazon service's public API. Each service with a public API has an API reference that can be found on the service's home page on the Amazon Documentation website. The content for an API reference varies based on how the API is constructed and which protocol is used. Typically, an API reference contains detailed information about the operations supported by the API, the data sent to and from the service, and any error conditions that the service can report.

API Documentation Sections
  • Actions – Detailed information on each operation and its parameters (including constraints on length or content, and default values). It lists the errors that can occur for this operation. Each operation corresponds to a subcommand in the Amazon CLI.

  • Data Types – Detailed information about structures that a command might require as a parameter, or return in response to a request.

  • Common Parameters – Detailed information about the parameters that are shared by all of action for the service.

  • Common Errors – Detailed information about errors that can be returned by any of the service's operations.

The name and availability of each section can vary, depending on the service.

Service-specific CLIs

Some services have a separate CLI that dates from before a single Amazon CLI was created to work with all services. These service-specific CLIs have separate documentation that is linked from the service's documentation page. Documentation for service-specific CLIs do not apply to the Amazon CLI.

Troubleshooting errors

For help diagnosing and fixing Amazon CLI errors, see Troubleshoot Amazon CLI errors.

Additional help

For additional help with your Amazon CLI issues, visit the Amazon CLI community on GitHub.