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AWS Documentation » AWS Command Line Interface » User Guide » Installing the AWS CLI » Install the AWS CLI on Linux
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Install the AWS CLI on Linux

You can install the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and its dependencies on most Linux distributions by using pip, a package manager for Python.

Important

The awscli package is available in repositories for other package managers such as apt and yum, but you're not assured of getting the latest version unless you get it from pip or use the bundled installer.

If you already have pip, follow the instructions in the main installation topic. Run pip --version to see if your version of Linux already includes Python and pip. We recommend that if you have Python version 3+ installed, that you use the pip3 command. 

$ pip3 --version

If you don't already have pip installed, check which version of Python is installed. 

$ python --version

or

$ python3 --version

If you don't already have Python 2 version 2.6.5+ or Python 3 version 3.3+, you must first install Python. If you do have Python installed, proceed to installing pip and the AWS CLI.

Sections

Install pip

If you don't already have pip installed, you can install it by using the script that the Python Packaging Authority provides.

To install pip

  1. Use the curl command to download the installation script. The following command uses the -O (capital letter O) parameter to specify that the downloaded file is to be stored in the current folder using the same name it has on the remote host. 

    $ curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

  2. Run the script with Python to download and install the latest version of pip and other required support packages. 

    $ python get-pip.py --user

    or

    $ python3 get-pip.py --user

    When you include the --user switch, the script installs pip to the path ~/.local/bin.

  3. Ensure the folder that contains pip is part of your PATH variable.

    1. Find your shell's profile script in your user folder. If you're not sure which shell you have, run echo $SHELL. 

      $ ls -a ~
.  ..  .bash_logout  .bash_profile  .bashrc  Desktop  Documents  Downloads

      • Bash – .bash_profile, .profile, or .bash_login

      • Zsh – .zshrc

      • Tcsh – .tcshrc, .cshrc or .login

    2. Add an export command at the end of your profile script that's similar to the following example. 

      export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH

      This command inserts the path, ~/.local/bin in this example, at the front of the existing PATH variable.

    3. Reload the profile into your current session to put those changes into effect. 

      $ source ~/.bash_profile

  4. Now you can test to verify that pip is installed correctly. 

    $ pip3 --version
pip 19.0.3 from ~/.local/lib/python3.7/site-packages (python 3.7)

Install the AWS CLI with pip

Use pip to install the AWS CLI. 

$ pip3 install awscli --upgrade --user

When you use the --user switch, pip installs the AWS CLI to ~/.local/bin.

Verify that the AWS CLI installed correctly.

$ aws --version
aws-cli/1.16.116 Python/3.6.8 Linux/4.14.77-81.59-amzn2.x86_64 botocore/1.12.106

If you get an error, see Troubleshooting AWS CLI Errors.

Upgrading to the latest version of the AWS CLI

We recommend that you regularly check to see if there is a new version of the AWS CLI and upgrade to it when you can.

Use the pip list -o command to check which packages are "outdated': 

$ aws --version
aws-cli/1.16.170 Python/3.7.3 Linux/4.14.123-111.109.amzn2.x86_64 botocore/1.12.160

$ pip3 list -o
Package    Version  Latest   Type 
---------- -------- -------- -----
awscli     1.16.170 1.16.198 wheel
botocore   1.12.160 1.12.188 wheel

Because the previous command shows that there is a newer version of the AWS CLI available, you can run pip install --upgrade to get the latest version: 

$ pip3 install --upgrade --user awscli
Collecting awscli
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/dc/70/b32e9534c32fe9331801449e1f7eacba6a1992c2e4af9c82ac9116661d3b/awscli-1.16.198-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.7MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 1.7MB 1.6MB/s 
Collecting botocore==1.12.188 (from awscli)
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/10/cb/8dcfb3e035a419f228df7d3a0eea5d52b528bde7ca162f62f3096a930472/botocore-1.12.188-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: docutils>=0.10 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from awscli) (0.14)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: rsa<=3.5.0,>=3.1.2 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from awscli) (3.4.2)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: colorama<=0.3.9,>=0.2.5 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from awscli) (0.3.9)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: PyYAML<=5.1,>=3.10; python_version != "2.6" in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from awscli) (3.13)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: s3transfer<0.3.0,>=0.2.0 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from awscli) (0.2.0)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: jmespath<1.0.0,>=0.7.1 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from botocore==1.12.188->awscli) (0.9.4)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: urllib3<1.26,>=1.20; python_version >= "3.4" in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from botocore==1.12.188->awscli) (1.24.3)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: python-dateutil<3.0.0,>=2.1; python_version >= "2.7" in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from botocore==1.12.188->awscli) (2.8.0)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: pyasn1>=0.1.3 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from rsa<=3.5.0,>=3.1.2->awscli) (0.4.5)
Requirement already satisfied, skipping upgrade: six>=1.5 in ./venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (from python-dateutil<3.0.0,>=2.1; python_version >= "2.7"->botocore==1.12.188->awscli) (1.12.0)
Installing collected packages: botocore, awscli
  Found existing installation: botocore 1.12.160
    Uninstalling botocore-1.12.160:
      Successfully uninstalled botocore-1.12.160
  Found existing installation: awscli 1.16.170
    Uninstalling awscli-1.16.170:
      Successfully uninstalled awscli-1.16.170
Successfully installed awscli-1.16.198 botocore-1.12.188

Add the AWS CLI Executable to Your Command Line Path

After installing with pip, you might need to add the aws executable to your operating system' PATH environment variable.

You can verify which folder pip installed the AWS CLI to by running the following command. 

$ which aws
/home/username/.local/bin/aws

You can reference this as ~/.local/bin/ because /home/username corresponds to ~ in Linux.

If you omitted the --user switch and so didn't install in user mode, the executable might be in the bin folder of your Python installation. If you don't know where Python is installed, run this command. 

$ which python
/usr/local/bin/python

The output might be the path to a symlink, not to the actual executable. Run ls -al to see where it points. 

$ ls -al /usr/local/bin/python
/usr/local/bin/python -> ~/.local/Python/3.6/bin/python3.6

If this is the same folder you added to the path in step 3 in Install pip, you're done. Otherwise, perform those same steps 3a–3c again, adding this additional folder to the path.