Amazon Lightsail CLI Extensions

April 23, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

This project is the source code of lightsailctl, a tool that augments Amazon Lightsail features in AWS CLI.

Usage

lightsailctl is executed automatically by AWS CLI when certain subcommands are used, such as aws lightsail push-container-image.

$ lightsailctl --plugin -h

Usage of `lightsailctl --plugin`:
  --input payload
        plugin payload
  --input-stdin
        receive plugin payload on stdin

Installing

Homebrew ๐Ÿป

brew install aws/tap/lightsailctl

From Source

lightsailctl is written in Go, so please install Go.

If all you want is to install lightsailctl binary, then do the following:

go install github.com/aws/lightsailctl@latest

Note: the executable is installed in $HOME/go/bin on macOS/Linux/Unix and in %USERPROFILE%\go\bin on Windows.

Keep reading if you want to work with lightsailctl source code locally.

After you clone this repo and open your terminal app in it, you'll be able to test and build this code like so:

go test ./...
go install ./...

Windows

For Windows installation instructions, please see Install Docker, AWS CLI, and the Lightsail Control plugin for containers.

Development

The Makefile wraps the common tasks:

make tools     # install goreleaser and golangci-lint (one-time)
make lint      # run golangci-lint
make test      # run unit tests
make ci        # lint + test (same as CI)
make snapshot  # build local release artifacts via goreleaser (dist/)
make help      # list targets

Under The Hood

Let's consider this command and see what actually happens:

aws lightsail push-container-image \
 --service-name hello \
 --image hello-world:latest \
 --label www

The above command pushes a local container image with tag hello-world:latest to make it available in Lightsail container service deployments for service hello.

This container image pushing logic requires a number of steps that are outsourced from AWS CLI to lightsailctl.

Here's a shell invocation of lightsailctl that approximates what AWS CLI does when the command above is invoked:

$ echo '{
  "inputVersion": "1",
  "operation": "PushContainerImage",
  "payload": {
    "service": "hello",
    "label":   "www",
    "image":   "hello-world:latest"
  }
}' | lightsailctl --plugin --input-stdin

85fcec7ef3ef: Layer already exists 
3e5288f7a70f: Layer already exists 
56bc37de0858: Layer already exists 
1c91bf69a08b: Layer already exists 
cb42413394c4: Layer already exists 
Digest: sha256:0b159cd1ee1203dad901967ac55eee18c24da84ba3be384690304be93538bea8
Image "hello-world:latest" registered.
Refer to this image as ":hello.www.73" in deployments.

Security Disclosures

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

Giving Feedback and Contributing

Aside from the security feedback covered above, do you have any feedback, bug reports, questions or feature ideas?

You are welcome to write up an issue for us.

Please read about Contributing Guidelines.

Releases

Releases are automated: pushing a v*.*.* tag triggers .github/workflows/release.yml, which uses GoReleaser to cross-compile binaries and attach them to a new GitHub release.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.