When to use AWS CLI and EB CLI

Question

For a month or so, I've been studying AWS services and now I have to accomplish some basic stuff on AWS elastic beanstalk via command line. As far as I understand there are the aws elasticbeanstalk [command] and the eb [command] CLI installed on the build instance.

When I run eb status inside application folder, I get response in the form:

Environment details for: app-name
Application name: app-name
Region: us-east-1
Deployed Version: app-version
Environment ID: env-name
Platform: 64bit Amazon Linux ........
Tier: WebServer-Standard
CNAME: app-name.elasticbeanstalk.com
Updated: 2016-07-14 .......
Status: Ready
Health: Green

That tells me eb init has been run for the application.

On the other hand if I run:

aws elasticbeanstalk describe-application-versions --application-name app-name --region us-east-1

I get the error:

Unable to locate credentials. You can configure credentials by running "aws configure".

In home folder of current user there is a .aws directory with a credential file containing a [profile] line and aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key lines all set up.

Beside the obvious problem with the credentials, what I really lack is understanding of the two cli. Why is EB cli not asking for credentials and AWS cli is? When do I use one or the other? Can I use only aws cli? Any clarification on the matter will be highly appreciated.

EDIT:

For anyone ending up here, having the same problem with "Unable to locate credentials". Adding --profile profile-name option solved the problem for me. profile-name can be found in ~/.aws/config (or credentials) file on [profile profile-name] line.

Answer 1

In order to verify that the AWS CLI is configured on your system run aws configure and provide it with all the details it requires. That should fix your credentials problem and checking the change in configuration will allow you to understand what's wrong with your current conf.

the eb cli and the aws cli have very similar capabilities, and I too am a bit confused as to why they both should exist. From my experience the main differences are that the cli is used to interact with your AWS account using simple requests while the eb cli creates connections between you and the eb envs and so allows for finer control over them.

For instance - I've just developed a CI/CD pipeline for our beanstalk apps. When I use the eb cli I can monitor the deployment of our apps and notify the developers when it's finished. aws cli does not offer that functionality, and the only to achieve that is to repeatedly query the service until you receive the desired result.

Answer 2

The AWS CLI is a general tool that works on all AWS resources. It's not tied to a specific software project, the type of machine you're on, the directory you're in, or anything like that. It only needs credentials, whether they've been put there manually if it's your own machine, or generated by AWS if it's an EC2 instance.

The EB CLI is a high level tool to wrangle your software project into place. It's tied to the directory you're in, it assumes that the stuff in your directory is your project, and it has short commands that do a lot of background work to magically put everything in the right place.