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Accepted
James
Asked: 2019-09-13 14:48:26 +0800 CST

AWS CLI ec2 run-instances fails with --tag-specifications parsing error

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I'm referring to the following AWS documentation, attempting to use the CLI (from Windows) to launch an EC2 instance with tags specified at launch time:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/run-instances.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Using_Tags.html#Using_Tags_CLI

I ran into some issues, so I decided to try the exact command as specified in the documentation:

aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-abc12345 --count 1 --instance-type t2.micro --key-name MyKeyPair --subnet-id subnet-6e7f829e --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=webserver,Value=production}]' 'ResourceType=volume,Tags=[{Key=cost-center,Value=cc123}]'

This results in the following error:

Error parsing parameter '--tag-specifications': Expected: '=', 
received: ''' for
 input:
'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=webserver,Value=production}]'
^

So, how exactly do you specify the tags for run-instances?

amazon-web-services

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    After much frustration and searching, I stumbled across a page that explained that the syntax for run-instances is documented incorrectly. I understand just enough Japanese to see the "mistake" and "correct" labels on the examples and see that the single-quotes around the values for the tag-specifications cause it to fail. The correct syntax is:

    aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-abc12345 --count 1 --instance-type t2.micro --key-name MyKeyPair --subnet-id subnet-6e7f829e --tag-specifications ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=webserver,Value=production}] ResourceType=volume,Tags=[{Key=cost-center,Value=cc123}]
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