What it does

Why I built it in Go

Install

What is next for ssmctl? Github: github.com/rhysmcneill/ssmctl I use AWS Session Manager a lot. No bastion hosts, no open ports, full CloudTrail audit trail — it's the right way to access EC2 instances. But every time I sat down to use it I found myself Googling the same commands, copy-pasting instance IDs from the console, and generally fighting the tooling more than getting work done. The native experience looks like this: And running a remote command means constructing a JSON document, calling send-command, then polling get-command-invocation for the output. There's no built-in file transfer at all. I got fed up and built ssmctl. It is a thin CLI wrapper that gives SSM the same interface as ssh and scp, the commands I already know by heart. Targets can be an instance ID or an EC2 Name tag — so web-1 just works without having to look up the ID first. It uses whatever AWS credentials you already have configured (env vars, ~/.aws/credentials etc). Nothing new to set up. It made sense for a single binary CLI tool — easy to cross-compile, easy to distribute via Homebrew or a direct download, no runtime dependency to manage on the user's machine. or grab a binary from the releases page

Binaries for Linux, macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), and Windows are on the releases page. It covers my day-to-day SSM workflow. Shell completions and JSON output for run/cp are on the roadmap, amongst a lot of other open issues (feel free to jump in if you are comfortable, we have a very open community contributing). If you use SSM regularly and have things you'd want it to do, open an issue — I'm genuinely interested in what would be useful. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse