How to tag launch template _itself_ in AWS with JSON and `create-launch-template` AWS CLI

Question

While creating EC2 launch templates with the create-launch-template AWS CLI ec2 command and a JSON spec, I can't seem to figure out how to tag the template itself. I'm providing the TagSpecifications correctly, because I can see the tags being applied to the resources when the launch template is used, but I want to tag the template itself, too.

I tried adding a Tags field to the JSON description of the launch template, that gave an error. The docs suggest using a TagSpecification object like so:

{ "ResourceType": "launch-template", "Tags": [ { "Key": "mykey", "Value": "myvalue" } ] } 

... (note the "launch-template" resource type) which runs just fine without erring, but the template gets created without any tags :-/

I could run some follow-up tagging statements, but I'm trying to avoid doing that, and this article suggests it's doable at creation-time.

Answer 1

I have followed the AWS-CLI example from Creating a launch template and it was indeed created with the tag associated.

This is the command I used:

aws ec2 create-launch-template \ --launch-template-name TemplateForWebServer \ --version-description WebVersion1 \ --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=launch-template,Tags=[{Key=purpose,Value=production}]' \ --launch-template-data file://template-data.json 

And this is the created launch template:

What's your AWS-CLI version? Perhaps it's too old. Mine is:

~ $ aws --version aws-cli/1.18.97 Python/3.6.9 Linux/5.4.0-52-generic botocore/1.17.20