aws-cli

name	aws-cli
description	Use when interacting with AWS. Triggers on AWS resources, services, or accounts — s3, ec2, iam, kms, secretsmanager, eks, ecs, lambda, cloudwatch, rds, dynamodb, cloudformation, route53, sns, sqs, and more. Use this skill whenever the user wants to inspect, query, troubleshoot, or manage AWS infrastructure, even if they don't say 'AWS' explicitly but reference cloud resources, ARNs, account IDs, regions, or specific AWS service names.
compatibility	Requires aws CLI v2 (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html) with SSO authentication configured at $HOME/.aws/config. Run `aws sso login` to refresh expired SSO tokens before use.
metadata	{"author":"Peter Benjamin","version":"0.2.0"}

AWS CLI Skill

Use aws help to explore commands and sub-commands for any service.

aws help       # all top-level commands
aws s3 help    # s3-specific commands
aws s3 ls help # s3 ls usage

AWS Profiles

The AWS configuration lives in $HOME/.aws/config. List available profiles with:

aws configure list-profiles

Profiles follow the naming convention [profile <ACCOUNT_ID>] or [profile <ACCOUNT_ALIAS>], so you can infer the right profile directly from an account ID. If an error message contains an ARN, then extract the AWS Account ID partition and pass it to --profile flag. If no account is specified, omit --profile to use the [default] profile.

SSO Token Expiry

If a command fails with Error loading SSO Token, the session has expired. Refresh it:

aws sso login

Output Formatting

AWS CLI defaults to JSON output. Use --output and --query (JMESPath) to control what you see:

# Human-readable table
aws ec2 describe-instances --output table --profile <profile>

# Extract specific fields as text
aws ec2 describe-instances \
    --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,InstanceType,State.Name]' \
    --output text --profile <profile>

Pagination

Many commands paginate results. Use --no-paginate to retrieve everything in one call (be careful on large datasets):

aws s3api list-objects-v2 --bucket <bucket> --no-paginate --profile <profile>

Or use --max-items and --starting-token to page manually.

Regions

AWS defaults to the region in your profile. Override with --region or AWS_DEFAULT_REGION:

aws ec2 describe-instances --region us-west-2 --profile <profile>

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Common Patterns

See references/patterns.md for CLI examples by service: EKS, EC2, S3, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, Lambda, CloudWatch Logs, RDS, DynamoDB, and CloudFormation.