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!

You can also do all of the sorting and filtering in the CLI itself, which should be portable between Windows / Mac / Linux:

$ aws ec2 describe-images --filters "Name=name,Values=amazon-eks-node-1.11*" --query 'reverse(sort_by(Images, &CreationDate))[0]'
{
    "Architecture": "x86_64",
    "CreationDate": "2019-06-15T06:31:01.000Z",
    "ImageId": "ami-053e2ac42d872cc20",
    "ImageLocation": "amazon/amazon-eks-node-1.11-v20190614",
    "ImageType": "machine",
    "Public": true,
    "OwnerId": "602401143452",
    "State": "available",
    "BlockDeviceMappings": [
        {
            "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
            "Ebs": {
                "DeleteOnTermination": true,
                "SnapshotId": "snap-06620aa1d7ab94987",
                "VolumeSize": 20,
                "VolumeType": "gp2",
                "Encrypted": false
            }
        }
    ],
    "Description": "EKS Kubernetes Worker AMI with AmazonLinux2 image (k8s: 1.11.9, docker:18.06)",
    "EnaSupport": true,
    "Hypervisor": "xen",
    "ImageOwnerAlias": "amazon",
    "Name": "amazon-eks-node-1.11-v20190614",
    "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
    "RootDeviceType": "ebs",
    "SriovNetSupport": "simple",
    "VirtualizationType": "hvm"
}