Common AWS CLI parameter types

This section describes some of the common parameter types and the typical required format.

If you are having trouble formatting a parameter for a specific command, check the help by entering help after the command name. The help for each subcommand includes an option's name and description. The option's parameter type is listed in parentheses. For more information on viewing help, see Get help with the AWS CLI.

String

String parameters can contain alphanumeric characters, symbols, and white spaces from the ASCII character set. Strings that contain white spaces must be surrounded by quotation marks. We recommend that you don't use symbols or white spaces other than the standard space character and to observe your terminal's quoting rules to prevent unexpected results.

Some string parameters can accept binary data from a file. See Binary files for an example.

Timestamp

Timestamps are formatted according to the ISO 8601 standard. These are often referred to as "DateTime" or "Date" parameters.

$ aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --start-time 2014-10-13T19:00:00Z

Acceptable formats include:

• YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssTZD (UTC), for example, 2014-10-01T20:30:00.000Z

• YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssTZD (with offset), for example, 2014-10-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

• YYYY-MM-DD, for example, 2014-10-01

• Unix time in seconds, for example, 1412195400. This is sometimes referred to as Unix Epoch time and represents the number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970 UTC.

By default, the AWS CLI version 2 translates all response DateTime values to ISO 8601 format.

You can set the timestamp format by using the cli_timestamp_format file setting.

List

One or more strings separated by spaces. If any of the string items contain a space, you must put quotation marks around that item. Observe your terminal's quoting rules to prevent unexpected results.

$ aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --instance-types m1.xlarge m1.medium

Boolean

Binary flag that turns an option on or off. For example, ec2 describe-spot-price-history has a Boolean --dry-run parameter that, when specified, validates the query with the service without actually running the query.

$ aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --dry-run

The output indicates whether the command was well formed. This command also includes a --no-dry-run version of the parameter that you can use to explicitly indicate that the command should be run normally. Including it isn't necessary because this is the default behavior.

Integer

An unsigned, whole number.

$ aws ec2 describe-spot-price-history --max-items 5

Binary / blob (binary large object) and streaming blob

In the AWS CLI, you can pass a binary value as a string directly on the command line. There are two types of blobs:

• Blob

• Streaming blob

Blob

To pass a value to a parameter with type blob, you must specify a path to a local file that contains the binary data using the fileb:// prefix. Files referenced using the fileb:// prefix are always treated as raw unencoded binary. The specified path is interpreted as being relative to the current working directory. For example, the --plaintext parameter for aws kms encrypt is a blob.

$ aws kms encrypt \
    --key-id 1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab \
    --plaintext fileb://ExamplePlaintextFile \
    --output text \
    --query CiphertextBlob | base64 \
    --decode > ExampleEncryptedFile

Note

For backwards compatibility, you can use the file:// prefix. There are two formats used based on the file setting cli_binary_format or --cli-binary-format command line option:

• Default for the AWS CLI version 2. If the setting's value is base64, files referenced using the file:// prefix are treated as base64-encoded text.

• Default for the AWS CLI version 1. If the setting's value is raw-in-base64-out, files referenced using the file:// prefix is read as text and then the AWS CLI attempts to encode it to binary.

For more information, see the file setting cli_binary_format or --cli-binary-format command line option.

Streaming blob

Streaming blobs such as aws cloudsearchdomain upload-documents do not use prefixes. Instead, streaming blob parameters are formatted using the direct file path. The following example uses the direct file path document-batch.json for the aws cloudsearchdomain upload-documents command:

$ aws cloudsearchdomain upload-documents \
    --endpoint-url https://doc-my-domain.us-west-1.cloudsearch.amazonaws.com \
    --content-type application/json \
    --documents document-batch.json

Map

A set of key-value pairs specified in JSON or by using the CLI's shorthand syntax. The following JSON example reads an item from an Amazon DynamoDB table named my-table with a map parameter, --key. The parameter specifies the primary key named id with a number value of 1 in a nested JSON structure.

For more advanced JSON usage in a command line, consider using a command line JSON processor, like jq, to create JSON strings. For more information on jq, see the jq repository on GitHub.

$ aws dynamodb get-item --table-name my-table --key '{"id": {"N":"1"}}'

{
    "Item": {
        "name": {
            "S": "John"
        },
        "id": {
            "N": "1"
        }
    }
}

Document

Note

Shorthand syntax is not compatible with document types.

Document types are used to send data without needing to embed JSON inside strings. The document type enables services to provide arbitrary schemas for you to use more flexible data types.

This allows for sending JSON data without needing to escape values. For example, instead of using the following escaped JSON input:

{"document": "{\"key\":true}"}

You can use the following document type:

{"document": {"key": true}}

Valid values for document types

Due to the flexible nature of document types, there are multiple valid value types. Valid values include the following:

String

--option '"value"'

Number

--option 123
--option 123.456

Boolean

--option true

Null

--option null

Array

--option '["value1", "value2", "value3"]'
--option '["value", 1, true, null, ["key1", 2.34], {"key2": "value2"}]'

Object

--option '{"key": "value"}'
--option '{"key1": "value1", "key2": 123, "key3": true, "key4": null, "key5": ["value3", "value4"], "key6": {"value5": "value6"}'