// the find
donnemartin/saws
A supercharged AWS command line interface (CLI).
SAWS wraps the AWS CLI with a REPL that adds tab-completion for commands, subcommands, and live AWS resources (bucket names, instance IDs, tags), plus fish-style suggestions and customizable shortcuts. It's for developers who live in the terminal and find themselves blanking on the exact subcommand or resource name mid-command. Built on python-prompt-toolkit, so the interactive layer is solid.
The resource auto-completion is the genuine differentiator — it actually calls your AWS account at startup to populate bucket names and instance IDs, so completions are real, not synthetic. Fuzzy shortcut matching (`aws ecstate` expanding to the full filter command) is a real productivity win once you internalize a few shortcuts. The contextual `docs` command that opens the relevant AWS docs page for whatever command you're halfway through typing is a small but smart touch. It wraps the CLI rather than reimplementing it, so any new AWS service the CLI picks up works automatically.
The project is effectively unmaintained — last commit was April 2024, last substantive work was years earlier, and the README still lists Python 2.6 and Travis CI (which went paid). Resource coverage is stuck at S3 buckets and EC2 instances; the README's own TODO admits more resources were planned and never shipped. If you work with ECS, RDS, Lambda, or anything modern, you're back to typing ARNs by hand. The startup resource fetch is a blocking synchronous call, so if your AWS credentials are slow or you have many buckets, you sit and wait with no feedback.