Overview

The Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils) is an open-source collection of Amazon EFS tools. There's no additional cost to use the Amazon EFS client, which you can download from GitHub here: https://github.com/aws/efs-utils. The amazon-efs-utils package is available in the Amazon Linux package repositories, and you can build and install the package on other Linux distributions. You can also use AWS Systems Manager to automatically install or update the package. For more information, see Using AWS Systems Manager to automatically install or update Amazon EFS clients.

Note

The amazon-efs-utils package comes pre-installed on Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

The Amazon EFS client includes a mount helper and tooling that makes it easier to perform encryption of data in transit for Amazon EFS file systems. A mount helper is a program that you use when you mount a specific type of file system. We recommend that you use the mount helper included with the Amazon EFS client to mount your Amazon EFS file systems. Using the Amazon EFS client simplifies mounting EFS file systems, and can provide improved file system performance. For more information about using the EFS client and mount helper, see Mounting EFS file systems.

The following dependencies exist for amazon-efs-utils and are installed when you install the amazon-efs-utils package:

• NFS client

  • nfs-utils for RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, and Fedora distributions

  • nfs-common for Debian and Ubuntu distributions

• Network relay (stunnel package, version 4.56 or later)

• Python (version 3.4 or later)

• OpenSSL 1.0.2 or newer

Note

By default, when using the Amazon EFS mount helper with Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mount helper enforces certificate hostname checking. The Amazon EFS mount helper mount helper uses the stunnel program for its TLS functionality. Some versions of Linux don't include a version of stunnel that supports these TLS features by default. When using one of those Linux versions, mounting an Amazon EFS file system using TLS fails.

When you've installed the amazon-efs-utils package, to upgrade your system's version of stunnel, see Upgrading stunnel.

You can use AWS Systems Manager to manage Amazon EFS clients and automate the tasks required to install or update the amazon-efs-utils package on your EC2 instances. For more information, see Using AWS Systems Manager to automatically install or update Amazon EFS clients.

For issues with encryption, see Troubleshooting encryption.

Supported distributions

The Amazon EFS client has been verified against the following Linux and Mac distributions:

Distribution	Package type	init system
Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023)	rpm	systemd
Amazon Linux 2017.09	rpm	upstart
Amazon Linux 2	rpm	systemd
CentOS 7, 8	rpm	systemd
Debian 9, 10	deb	systemd
Fedora 28 - 32	rpm	systemd
macOS Big Sur		launchd
macOS Monterey		launchd
macOS Ventura		launchd
OpenSUSE Leap, Tumbleweed	rpm	systemd
Oracle8	rpm	systemd
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, 8, 9	rpm	systemd
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12, 15	rpm	systemd
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS	deb	systemd

For a complete list of supported distributions that the package has been verified against, see the amazon-efs-utils README on Github.

In the following sections, you can learn how to install the Amazon EFS client on your EC2 Linux and Mac instances.