ZSH+Boto Tab Completion for AWS

zsh is an awesome shell. It has enhanced tab completion features that go way beyond what you probably expect from a shell. If you don’t already use zsh but would like to start, this is a great place to jump in, it has everything you could ever want to know about zsh.

I use zsh as my main shell, especially for the revision control information in my prompt, appreciatively copied from the grml zshrc, 2700 lines of more than you need in a shell.

I also use S3 and elbadmin on a more or less daily basis, and often find myself having to run different versions of those commands a bunch of times to drill down to the options I actually want. There’s no built-in way to tab-complete things like S3 buckets or Elastic Load Balancers, so I started work on one.

Currently, it supports elbadmin completely (except for tab-completing listeners) and lss3 to the extent that it completes available buckets, but not keys within those buckets. It’s available on Github.

There are pre-reqs to get tab-completion working, but they’re very minimal. First, you need to have boto and zsh both installed.

$ which zsh
/usr/bin/which: no zsh in (your $PATH)
$ yum install zsh
$ which zsh
/bin/zsh
$ pip install boto

Now you need to pull down my tab-completion scripts from Github and put them somewhere zsh knows about. In this case, we’re putting it in the .zsh directory and telling zsh to look there for extra tab-completion scripts.

$ cd .zsh
$ git clone git://github.com/ryansb/zsh-boto.git
$ echo "fpath=($fpath /home/user/.zsh/zsh-boto)
autoload -uz compinit
compinit" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

Now that that’s done, you can go straight to using it. Try these to start:

$ lss3 <TAB>
$ elbadmin <TAB>
$ elbadmin add <TAB>
$ elbadmin add myloadbalancer <TAB>
$ elbadmin add myloadbalancer i-12345

The process of writing it was pretty interesting, as I’d never seriously worked with zsh scripting outside of some basic task automation.