Find the most recent Ubuntu AMI using aws-cli (or any other AMI for that matter)

amifind.sh

#!/bin/sh

# Use AWS CLI to get the most recent version of an AMI that 
# matches certain criteria. Has obvious uses. Made possible via
# --query, --output text, and the fact that RFC3339 datetime
# fields are easily sortable.

export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

aws ec2 describe-images \
 --filters Name=name,Values=ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-trusty-14.04-amd64* \
 --query 'Images[*].[ImageId,CreationDate]' --output text \
 | sort -k2 -r \
 | head -n1

Nice!

Thanks!

You're awesome, thank you!

Piping it to cut -f 1 will give only the ami name :)

Might want to limit that to the Ubuntu Cloud account. Can also use sort_by in the query to get the most recent.

aws ec2 describe-images \
    --owners 099720109477 \
    --filters Name=name,Values=ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-amd64-server-* \
    --query 'sort_by(Images,&CreationDate)[-1].ImageId'

@michaelajr perfect, thanks.

Is there any way we can get the Latest AMI for all the regions instead of a specific one?

Is there a much more canonical filter to use,instead of "Name=name"?In case someone create a ami with similar name.

Is it possible to integrate that into cloudformation template?

Good Find!

Revised to capture all Ubuntu Images:
aws ec2 describe-images --filters "Name=name,Values=ubuntu*" --query "sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[].Name"

@aggy07 Run command against region that you want, and it will give you the corresponding AMI for that region. Commands must be run against a specific region, no way to list all AMI's in all regions at once.

This is good, thanks!!

With Image Name and AMI ID together,
aws ec2 describe-images --filters "Name=name,Values=ubuntu*" --query "sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[].[Name, ImageId]"

BTW, Thanks to All of you for posting your comments on this. It helped me!