The AWS CLI Just Got Much Better

The amazing auto-prompt mode of the AWS CLI

I always found the AWS CLI quite painful to use. It’s hard to remember the commands and arguments, and the output is unwieldy and opaque. Due to this, you usually have to look up stuff in the documentation over and over again, which is extremely tedious.

However, recently I discovered a built-in feature of the AWS CLI that changes this all: the auto-prompt mode!

The auto-prompt mode is an on-demand built-in UI of the AWS CLI that you can use to interactively build your AWS commands.

Here’s an example of it in action:

If the above seemed a bit fast, don’t worry, this article walks through all the features of the AWS CLI auto-prompt mode in detail.

If you know the AWS Shell and think that the auto-prompt mode is quite similar to it, you’re right. These tools have a lot in common. Their relation is explained in this post by the creators of the AWS CLI. In short, the AWS CLI auto-prompt mode is intended to supersede the AWS Shell.

Setup

You don’t need to install anything to use the AWS CLI auto-prompt mode. It’s included by default in the AWS CLI (since v2).