What is Alibaba Cloud CLI

Scripting and automation

Save commands in shell scripts to run them repeatedly or integrate them into CI/CD pipelines, for tasks such as batch resource creation, scheduled cleanup, and cross-region inspection.

For example, query ECS instances across multiple regions:

for region in cn-hangzhou cn-shanghai cn-beijing; do
  aliyun ecs describe-instances --biz-region-id "$region" --pager
done

Switch between environments

CLI lets you save multiple credential profiles and switch between development, testing, and production environments, regions, or accounts with the --profile parameter, without re-entering credentials:

aliyun ecs describe-instances --profile dev
aliyun ecs describe-instances --profile prod

Structured output and composition

Commands return structured text such as JSON, which pipes cleanly into standard tools like jq, grep, and awk for further processing or programmatic parsing.

For example, extract the IDs of all running instances in the current region:

aliyun ecs describe-instances --biz-region-id cn-hangzhou --pager \
  | jq -r '.Instances.Instance[] | select(.Status=="Running") | .InstanceId'

AI agent integration

Commands are text-based and behave predictably, so AI agents can generate commands and parse results directly, without a graphical interface.

CLI includes a built-in MCP authentication proxy (aliyun utils mcp-proxy) that connects third-party AI applications such as Dify and LangChain to OpenAPI MCP Server.

After you start the local authentication proxy, the AI agent application accesses OpenAPI MCP Server through http://127.0.0.1:8088:

aliyun utils mcp-proxy --port 8088

For configuration details, see Proxy an OpenAPI MCP server with aliyun mcp-proxy.