List resources across all regions using the AWS CLI

Today, I needed to list all AWS CloudFormation stacks across all locations under my account. It wasn’t as straightforward as I initially thought because the AWS CLI doesn’t have a single command to do that. The --region all global flag would be nice. Luckily, with a little bit of Bash scripting, we can get the job done.

List of all active regions

The first part of the puzzle is to obtain the list of all active regions.

aws account list-regions --region-opt-status-contains ENABLED ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT

List resources in all regions

The second part is to loop the output of the previous command using the command to list resources in a specific region. In my case, I needed to list CloudFormation stacks, which can be done with the following command:

for region in $(aws account list-regions --region-opt-status-contains ENABLED ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT --query "Regions[].{Region: RegionName}" --output text)
do 
  echo "Region: $region"
  aws cloudformation list-stacks --region=$region 
done

With just a few adjustments, you can replace aws cloudformation list-stacks with any other command for different types of resources. Allow me to provide you with some examples.

• aws dynamodb list-tables - to list DynamoDB tables
• aws lambda list-functions - to list Lambda functions
• aws rds describe-db-instances - to list RDS databases

Quick and easy copy/pasta type of post 🍝

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