Configuring the Amazon ECS CLI

Amazon ECS has released AWS Copilot, a command line interface (CLI) tool that simplifies building, releasing, and operating production-ready containerized applications on Amazon ECS from a local development environment. For more information, see Using the AWS Copilot command line interface.

The Amazon ECS CLI requires some basic configuration information before you can use it, such as your AWS credentials, the AWS Region in which to create your cluster, and the name of the Amazon ECS cluster to use. Configuration information is stored in the ~/.ecs directory on macOS and Linux systems and in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\local\ecs on Windows systems.

To configure the Amazon ECS CLI

1. Set up a CLI profile with the following command, substituting profile_name with your desired profile name, $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables with your AWS credentials.

   ecs-cli configure profile --profile-name profile_name --access-key $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --secret-key $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

2. Complete the configuration with the following command, substituting launch_type with the task launch type you want to use by default, region_name with your desired AWS Region, cluster_name with the name of an existing Amazon ECS cluster or a new cluster to use, and configuration_name for the name you'd like to give this configuration.

   ecs-cli configure --cluster cluster_name --default-launch-type launch_type --region region_name --config-name configuration_name

After you have installed and configured the CLI, you can try the Tutorial: Creating a cluster with a Fargate task using the Amazon ECS CLI. For more information, see the Amazon ECS Command Line Reference in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

Profiles

The Amazon ECS CLI supports the configuring of multiple sets of AWS credentials as named profiles using the ecs-cli configure profile command. A default profile can be set by using the ecs-cli configure profile default command. These profiles can then be referenced when you run Amazon ECS CLI commands that require credentials using the --ecs-profile flag otherwise the default profile is used.

For more information, see the Amazon ECS Command Line Reference in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

Cluster Configurations

A cluster configuration is a set of fields that describes an Amazon ECS cluster including the name of the cluster and the region. A default cluster configuration can be set by using the ecs-cli configure default command. The Amazon ECS CLI supports the configuring of multiple named cluster configurations using the --config-name option.

For more information, see the Amazon ECS Command Line Reference in the Amazon Elastic Container Service Developer Guide.

Order of Precedence

There are multiple methods for passing both the credentials and the region in an Amazon ECS CLI command. The following is the order of precedence for each of these.

The order of precedence for credentials is:

1. Amazon ECS CLI profile flags:

   1. Amazon ECS profile (--ecs-profile)

   2. AWS profile (--aws-profile)

2. Environment variables:

   1. ECS_PROFILE

   2. AWS_PROFILE

   3. AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN

3. ECS config‐attempts to fetch credentials from the default ECS profile.

4. Default AWS profile — Attempts to use credentials (aws_access_key_id, aws_secret_access_key) or assume_role (role_arn, source_profile) from the AWS profile name.

   1. AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE environment variable (defaults to default).

5. EC2 instance role

The order of precedence for Region is:

1. Amazon ECS CLI flags:

   1. Region flag (--region)

   2. Cluster config flag (--cluster-config)

2. ECS config‐attempts to fetch the Region from the default ECS profile.

3. Environment variables—Attempts to fetch the region from the following environment variables:

   1. AWS_REGION

   2. AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

4. AWS profile ‐ attempts to use the region from the AWS profile name:

   1. AWS_PROFILE environment variable

   2. AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE environment variable (defaults to default)