AWS CLI: ECR list-images, get newest - amazon-web-services

Question

Using AWS CLI, and jq if needed, I'm trying to get the tag of the newest image in a particular repo.
Let's call the repo foo, and say the latest image is tagged bar. What query do I use to return bar?
I got as far as
aws ecr list-images --repository-name foo
and then realized that the list-images documentation gives no reference to the date as a queryable field. Sticking the above in a terminal gives me keypairs with just the tag and digest, no date.
Is there still some way to get the "latest" image? Can I assume it'll always be the first, or the last in the returned output?

Answer 1

You can use describe-images instead.
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo
returns imagePushedAt which is a timestamp property which you can use to filter.
I dont have examples in my account to test with but something like following should work
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo \
--query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[*]'
If you want another flavor of using sort method, you can review this post

Answer 2

To add to Frederic's answer, if you want the latest, you can use [-1]:
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo \
--query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[-1].imageTags[0]'
Assuming you are using a singular tag on your images... otherwise you might need to use imageTags[*] and do a little more work to grab the tag you want.

Answer 3

To get only latest image with out special character minor addition required for above answer.
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo --query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[-1].imageTags[0]' --output text

Answer 4

List latest 3 images pushed to ECR
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name gvh \
--query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[*].imageTags[0]' --output yaml \
| tail -n 3 | awk -F'- ' '{print $2}'
List first 3 images pushed to ECR
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name gvh \
--query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[*].imageTags[0]' --output yaml \
| head -n 3 | awk -F'- ' '{print $2}'
Number '3' can be generalized in either head or tail command based on user requirement

Answer 5

Without having to sort the results, you can filter them specifying the imageTag=latest on image-ids, like so:
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo --image-ids imageTag=latest --output text
This will return only one result with the newest image, which is the one tagged as latest

Answer 6

Some of the provided solutions will fail because:
There is no image tagged with 'latest'.
There are multiple tags available, eg. [1.0.0, 1.0.9, 1.0.11]. With a sort_by this will return 1.0.9. Which is not the latest.
Because of this it's better to check for the image digest.
You can do so with this simple bash script:
#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
# FILE: get-latest-image-per-ecr-repo.sh
#
# USAGE: ./get-latest-image-per-ecr-repo.sh aws-account-id
#
# AUTHOR: Enri Peters (EP)
# CREATED: 04/07/2022 12:59:15
#=======================================================================
set -o nounset # Treat unset variables as an error
for repo in \
$(aws ecr describe-repositories |\
jq -r '.repositories[].repositoryArn' |\
sort -u |\
awk -F ":" '{print $6}' |\
sed 's/repository\///')
do
echo "$1.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/${repo}#$(aws ecr describe-images\
--repository-name ${repo}\
--query 'sort_by(imageDetails,& imagePushedAt)[-1].imageDigest' |\
tr -d '"')"
done > latest-image-per-ecr-repo-${1}.list
The output will be written to a file named latest-image-per-ecr-repo-awsaccountid.list.
An example of this output could be:
123456789123.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/your-ecr-repository-name#sha256:fb839e843b5ea1081f4bdc5e2d493bee8cf8700458ffacc67c9a1e2130a6772a
...
...
With this you can do something like below to pull all the images to your machine.
#!/bin/bash -
for image in $(cat latest-image-per-ecr-repo-353131512553.list)
do
docker pull $image
done
You will see that when you run docker images that none of the images are tagged. But you can 'fix' this by running these commands:
docker images --format "docker image tag {{.ID}} {{.Repository}}:latest" > tag-images.sh
chmod +x tag-images.sh
./tag-images.sh
Then they will all be tagged with latest on your machine.

Answer 7

To get the latest image tag use:-
aws ecr describe-images --repository-name foo --query 'imageDetails[*].imageTags[ * ]' --output text | sort -r | head -n 1