A Security Group is used to allow or deny requests coming in (ingress) and/or requests going out (egress). For example, a Security Group could be used to only allow requests within a certain IP address range to come in (ingress) and go out (egress) of an EC2 Instance.

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This assumes you have already configured the aws command line tool. If not, check out my article on Getting Started with the AWS CLI.

The aws ec2 describe-security-groups command can be used to list your EC2 security groups.

aws ec2 describe-security-groups

The --filter option can be used to only return Security Groups matching a certain name.

aws ec2 describe-security-groups --filters Name=group-name,Values=my-security-group

And here is an example of how to limit the output using the --query option.

aws ec2 describe-security-groups --query 'SecurityGroups[?GroupName==`default`]'

Something like this should be returned.

{
    "SecurityGroups": [
        {
            "Description": "My security group",
            "IpPermissions": [
                {
                    "FromPort": 22,
                    "IpProtocol": "tcp",
                    "IpRanges": [
                        {
                            "CidrIp": "0.0.0.0/0",
                            "Description": "SSH"
                        }
                    ],
                    "Ipv6Ranges": [],
                    "PrefixListIds": [],
                    "ToPort": 22,
                    "UserIdGroupPairs": []
                }
            ],

            "IpPermissionsEgress": [
                {
                    "IpProtocol": "-1",
                    "IpRanges": [
                        {
                            "CidrIp": "0.0.0.0/0"
                        }
                    ],
                    "UserIdGroupPairs": [],
                    "PrefixListIds": []
                }
            ],
            "Tags": [
                {
                    "Value": "my Security Group",
                    "Key": "Name"
                }
            ],
            "GroupName": "my-security-group",
            "VpcId": "vpc-1a2b34aa",
            "OwnerId": "123456789012",
            "GroupId": "sg-0c3296123415abcd1",
        }
    ]
}