How to call Alibaba Cloud APIs and manage cloud resources in Cloud Shell-阿里云帮助中心

You can call Alibaba Cloud APIs directly in Cloud Shell to manage your cloud resources.

Step 1: Start Cloud Shell

You can start Cloud Shell in one of the following ways:

In the console
Click the command line button in the top navigation bar of the console home page to start Cloud Shell.
As a standalone application
In a browser, open https://shell.aliyun.com to start the Cloud Shell interface.
You can open up to five Cloud Shell windows at the same time.

Note

When you connect to Cloud Shell for the first time, a virtual machine (VM) is created. This process can take up to 40 s. If you open multiple Cloud Shell windows, they all connect to the same VM. Opening additional windows does not create more VMs.

Step 2: Use CLI commands to manage cloud resources

You can use Alibaba Cloud command-line interface (CLI) commands in Cloud Shell to manage your cloud resources.

To call Remote Procedure Call (RPC) APIs in Cloud Shell, use the following format:

aliyun <ProductCode> <ActionName> [--parameter1 value1 --parameter2 value2]

Where:

ProductCode: The code of the cloud product. For example, the product code for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is ecs, and the product code for Server Load Balancer (SLB) is slb. Run the aliyun --help command to view product codes.
ActionName: The name of the API to call. For example, you can call the DescribeInstanceAttribute API of ECS to view the details of an ECS instance.
parameter: The request parameters. For more information, see the API documentation for each product.

(Optional) Step 3: View help

You can run the following commands to view help information:

In Cloud Shell, run the following command to view help information for a cloud product.
```
aliyun <ProductCode> --help
```
Example
Run the following command to view the API list for ECS:
```
aliyun ecs --help
```
In Cloud Shell, run the following command to view help for a specific API:
```
aliyun <ProductCode> <ApiName> --help
```
Example
Run the following command to view the help information for the DescribeInstanceAttribute ECS API:
```
aliyun ecs DescribeInstanceAttribute --help
```