You can start Cloud Shell in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console or as a stand-alone application. After you start Cloud Shell, you can use Cloud Shell to manage your Alibaba Cloud resources.

Start Cloud Shell

To start Cloud Shell, use one of the following methods:

  • Start Cloud Shell in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console.

    In the Alibaba Cloud Management Console, click the Cloud Shell icon in the top navigation bar.

  • Start Cloud Shell as a stand-alone application

    Enter https://shell.aliyun.com in the address bar of a browser or click Online Linux Shell in the menu bar of OpenAPI Explorer.

    You can open up to five Cloud Shell windows at the same time.

When you start Cloud Shell, take note of the following items.

  • The first time you use Cloud Shell, a virtual machine is automatically created. This operation requires up to 40 seconds to complete.

Run CLI commands to manage Alibaba Cloud resources

You can run Alibaba Cloud CLI commands in Cloud Shell to manage your Alibaba Cloud resources. For more information, see Use Alibaba Cloud CLI to manage Alibaba Cloud resources.

Run commands in the following format to call RPC API operations in Cloud Shell. 
aliyun <ProductCode> <ActionName> [--parameter1 value1 --paramter2 value2]

Description:

  • ProductCode: specifies the code of the Alibaba Cloud service whose operation you want to call, such as ecs for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and slb for Server Load Balancer (SLB). You can run the aliyun --help command to view the code of an Alibaba Cloud service.

  • ActionName: specifies the name of the API operation that you want to call. For example, you can call an ECS API operation named DescribeInstanceAttribute to view the details of an ECS instance.

  • parameter: specifies the request parameters. For more information, see the API reference of each Alibaba Cloud service.

Example

Run the following command in Cloud Shell to view the configuration information about an ECS instance.
Note Before you run the command, replace i-bp198exxxxxx with an actual instance ID. 
aliyun ecs DescribeInstanceAttribute --InstanceId i-bp198exxxxxx

View help information

You can use the help option to view help information.

  • Run the following command in Cloud Shell to view the API operations that are supported by an Alibaba Cloud service: 
    aliyun <ProductCode> --help

    Example

    Run the following command to view ECS API operations:

    aliyun ecs --help

  • Run the following command in Cloud Shell to view the help information about an API operation: 

    aliyun <ProductCode> <ApiName> --help

    Example

    Run the following command to view the help information about the DescribeInstanceAttribute operation: 

    aliyun ecs DescribeInstanceAttribute --help