The HFT Guy

A developer in London

Amazon website is limited to 50 instances per page. Viewing lots of instances is a pain and it doesn’t support exporting to CSV/TSV/Excel/other out of the box. The only fix is to use the CLI.

Requirements

• An AWS account with access rights to see your servers
• A pair of AWS keys (Users -> [username] -> Security Credentials -> Create Access Key)

Listing Instances

You can modify the command to pick the information you want. Refer to the official AWS command line reference.

5 thoughts on “How to export Amazon EC2 instances to a CSV file”

1. chodesuresh says:
   3 January 2018 at 21:32

   thanks that works. If you want to get instances with name in tabular format use the below command

   aws ec2 describe-instances –output text –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId, State.Name, [Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value] [0][0] ]’ –output table

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2. john nicholson says:
   26 February 2018 at 14:32

   Thank you very much HFT guy for this tip! I was asked to generate a list our AWS instances for coporate SecOps team, and found I could not simply export from console. I had to change ‘ to ” before Reservations and at the end before the >. But this worked for me. I ran it from from a windows 10 laptop with AWS CLI installed. Note also, I used –profile to supply the aws credentials needed for our awsprod environment (we have a test/dev environment too :
   aws –profile awsprod ec2 describe-instances –output text –query “Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId, InstanceType, ImageId, State.Name, LaunchTime, Placement.AvailabilityZone, Placement.Tenancy, PrivateIpAddress, PrivateDnsName, PublicDnsName, [Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value] [0][0], [Tags[?Key==`purpose`].Value] [0][0], [Tags[?Key==`environment`].Value] [0][0], [Tags[?Key==`team`].Value] [0][0] ]” > c:\instances.tsv

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3. Corey Hallisey says:
   15 October 2019 at 18:11

   Any way to include a first row of column headers in the output?

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   • Sergey says:
     24 December 2019 at 22:36

     aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].{Internal_IP:NetworkInterfaces[0].PrivateIpAddresses[0].PrivateIpAddress,Instance_ID:InstanceId,Instance_name:Tags[?Key==`Name`]|[0].Value,Region:Placement.AvailabilityZone,PublicDNS:PublicDnsName,KeyName:KeyName,Type_of_instance:InstanceType,Public_IP:PublicIpAddress}’ –output table

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4. Luke Rawlins says:
   28 February 2020 at 17:21

   This is definitely going to come in handy! Thanks!

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