cfntop

Live TUI monitor for AWS CloudFormation stacks.

Stacks are sorted by last update, with active deployments on top. Expand any stack to see its resources and their current status. ECS services show active deployments with task counts and failed task details.

Features

• Real-time polling of all CloudFormation stacks in a region
• Active deployments auto-expand and always poll on every cycle
• Recently-updated stacks auto-expand on startup (up to 5, within last 3 hours)
• Expanded inactive stacks refresh once per minute
• ECS service deployments with running/desired/pending/failed task counts
• Failed ECS task details with stop codes and reasons
• Event history for errored resources (scoped to the most recent deploy)
• Recently deleted resources shown with dim styling
• Relative timestamps by default (e.g. "2m ago"), optional absolute mode
• Status color coding: green (complete), yellow (in-progress), red (failed/rollback)

Install

Homebrew

brew install awesome-foundation/tap/cfntop

macOS (Apple Silicon)

curl -sSL https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfntop/releases/latest/download/cfntop_0.5.0_darwin_arm64.tar.gz | tar xz -C ~/.local/bin # x-release-please-version

macOS (Intel)

curl -sSL https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfntop/releases/latest/download/cfntop_0.5.0_darwin_amd64.tar.gz | tar xz -C ~/.local/bin # x-release-please-version

Linux (amd64)

curl -sSL https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfntop/releases/latest/download/cfntop_0.5.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz | tar xz -C ~/.local/bin # x-release-please-version

Linux (arm64)

curl -sSL https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfntop/releases/latest/download/cfntop_0.5.0_linux_arm64.tar.gz | tar xz -C ~/.local/bin # x-release-please-version

Go install

go install github.com/awesome-foundation/cfntop/cmd/cfntop@latest

Ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. Add export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to your shell profile if needed.

Usage

cfntop [flags]

Flags:
  -r, --region string     AWS region
  -p, --profile string    AWS profile
  -n, --interval int      Poll interval in seconds (default 5)
      --absolute-time     Show absolute timestamps instead of relative (e.g. 2m ago)
  -h, --help              help for cfntop
      --version           version for cfntop

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
↑ / k	Move cursor up
↓ / j	Move cursor down
enter / space	Expand / collapse stack
r	Force refresh
q / ctrl+c	Quit

Permissions

cfntop requires read-only AWS CloudFormation access:

• cloudformation:ListStacks
• cloudformation:ListStackResources
• cloudformation:DescribeStackEvents

For ECS deployment details:

• ecs:DescribeServices
• ecs:ListTasks
• ecs:DescribeTasks