Manage Alibaba Cloud resources with Alibaba Cloud CLI - Cloud Shell

This topic describes how to use Alibaba Cloud CLI within Cloud Shell to manage your Alibaba Cloud resources from the command line.

Overview of Cloud Shell and Alibaba Cloud CLI

Cloud Shell is a browser-based command-line interface that provides pre-installed tools, including Alibaba Cloud CLI, for managing your cloud resources. For more information, see What is Cloud Shell?

Alibaba Cloud CLI is a command-line tool that allows you to interact with Alibaba Cloud services through APIs. For more information, see What is Alibaba Cloud CLI?

Prerequisites

To ensure security, we recommend logging on to the console and using Cloud Shell as a RAM identity (RAM user or RAM role) instead of the Alibaba Cloud account. The RAM identity must have the necessary permissions to manage the resources you intend to work with. For more information, see Identity-based policies.
When you start Cloud Shell, it automatically configures the CLI with credentials based on your logged-on identity. Do not modify or delete the default credential configuration file.

Procedure

Step 1: Start Cloud Shell

You can start Cloud Shell in two ways:

From the Alibaba Cloud Management Console: Click the Cloud Shell icon in the top navigation bar.
As a standalone application: Navigate directly to https://shell.aliyun.com.

Note

The first time you start Cloud Shell, a virtual machine (VM) instance is provisioned for you, which may take a few moments. Subsequent sessions will start faster.
You can open up to five concurrent windows. All sessions share the same underlying VM instance.

Step 2: Construct and run a command

You can obtain CLI commands in two ways:

Method 1: Use OpenAPI Explorer (Recommended)

OpenAPI Explorer is the easiest way to find and generate CLI commands.

In OpenAPI Explorer, search for the service and API operation you want to use.
On the Debugging page, fill in the required parameters.
Click the CLI Example tab to view the automatically generated command.
Click Run Command in CloudShell (the icon) to directly run the command in Cloud Shell, or copy (the icon) the command and paste it into your Cloud Shell window.

For more information, see Generate a command.

Method 2: Use built-in help

Understand command structure

Alibaba Cloud CLI supports two API styles: RPC and RESTful. Most services, including Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and ApsaraDB RDS, use the RPC style. The command structure differs slightly between them. You can identify the API style by checking if the API documentation specifies an Action parameter (RPC) or a PathPattern (RESTful). For more information, see Command structure.

You can use the --help flag to get information about services, operations, and parameters directly in the CLI.

To get help for a specific service:
```
aliyun <ProductCode> --help
```
Example for ECS:
```
aliyun ecs --help
```
To get help for a specific API operation:
```
aliyun <ProductCode> <ApiName> --help
```
Example for the DescribeInstances operation in ECS:
```
aliyun ecs DescribeInstanceAttribute --help
```

Step 3: (Example) Create an ECS instance

The following command is an example of using the CLI to create a pay-as-you-go ECS instance.

The CLI will return a JSON response containing details of the newly created instance.

Cloud Shell:Manage Alibaba Cloud resources with Alibaba Cloud CLI in Cloud Shell