gossm

gossm

gossm is a cross-platform command-line tool that makes it ridiculously simple to run shell commands remotely on your AWS EC2 instances. It is powered by the AWS Systems Manager service, which allows remote control through the SSM Agent. The agent is preinstalled on Windows, Amazon Linux and Ubuntu AMIs. It can also be manually installed on others.

Installation

Download the latest release from GitHub Releases. There is a different file for Mac, Windows and Linux. Choose the download for the computer you are using, not the OS the EC2 instance is running.

Usage

Usage is as simple as specifying the instance(s) you want to run a command on and the command you want to run. Specific instance(s) can be listed using -i and multiple instances can be specified, e.g. -i i-abc123 -i i-def456. Alternatively, you can specify a tag using -t and all matching instances will run the command, e.g. -t tagname=value.

If you don't want interleaved output when running a command on multiple instances, it can also be helpful to save the output to files. This can be done using -f. This will save the files to <cmd>/<instance id>.txt in the current directory.

Additionally, you can specify an AWS profile using --profile <name> and "quiet" mode using -q, which shows only command output and no metadata.