Json queries with JMEPath and jq

Interactive tools

Jiq

Install jq Install Golang <1.7 If your environmental variable

echo $GOPATH
GOPATH=/home/ubuntu/.local/go

is set, so add

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/go"

to .bashrc or .profile files.

jq

Get a filtered list of instance name, type, virt type, instance id

At the beginning my simple convention for Json is [] is an array and {} is an object.

Get an JSON output of all instances in your AWS accounty

aws ec2 describe-instances --output json | jiq #pipe into jiq

.Reservations[].Instances[] returns all data that we need, therefore we pipe into new object { _key1: XXX, _key2: YYY }. Actually, the keys fields we define now, as: _name, _id, _id, _type.

Filter]> .Reservations[].Instances[] | {_name: .Tags[], _id: .InstanceId, _type: .InstanceType, _virtType: .Hypervisor }

Next, let's select only Tags we are interested in, from a list(object). Therefore, we pipe Tags via select function. Where the Tag name is Name and we want get value {name: .Tags[] | select(.Key=="Name").Value

Full filter command:

[Filter]> .Reservations[].Instances[] | {name: .Tags[] | select(.Key=="Name").Value, id: .InstanceId, type: .InstanceType, virt_type: .Hypervisor }

Awscli queries

$ aws ec2 describe-instances \
  --output table \
  --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].[Tags[?Key==`Name`] | [0].Value,InstanceId,InstanceType]'

And we get a nicely formatted table:
-----------------------------------------------
|              DescribeInstances              |
+----------------+--------------+-------------+
|  xxxxxxxxxx    |  i-a0169xxx  |  r3.large   |
|  yyyyyyyyyy    |  i-11a46xxx  |  m3.large   |
|  zzzzzzzzzzzzzz|  i-07c4axxx  |  t2.medium  |
+----------------+--------------+-------------+