Get a quick list of all AWS instances using JQ and AWS Cli

Today I needed to get a quick list of all my AWS instances, and rather then try to copy and paste from the aweful AWS web UI I figured I would go the manly route and do this using the CLI tools.

It turned out this was actually pretty easy using JQ and the AWS Cli, both of which can be installed via Homebrew:

brew install jq
brew install awscli

Once you have it installed and configured the following will give you a list of all instances with have a Name tag.

aws ec2 describe-instances | jq -r '.Reservations[].Instances[].Tags[] | select ( .Key | contains("Name") ) | .Value'

If you wanted to drill down a little further you could add another qualifier and show only instances with a state of running.

aws ec2 describe-instances | jq -r '.Reservations[].Instances[]| select ( .State.Name | contains("running")) | .Tags[] | select ( .Key | contains("Name") ) | .Value'

Hope thats helpful !