Installing the Amazon EFS client

We recommend that you install the Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils), an open-source collection of tools for Amazon EFS. The Amazon EFS client includes a mount helper, which is a program that helps simplify mounting EFS file systems. The client also enables the ability to use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor an EFS file system's mount status, and it includes tooling that makes it easier to perform encryption of data in transit for Amazon EFS file systems.

You can manually install the Amazon EFS client on Amazon EC2 instances running supported distributions. For certain supported operating systems, you can alternatively configure AWS Systems Manager to automatically install or update the package. For a list of distributions that you can use with AWS Systems Manager, see Systems Manager Distributor supported operating systems.

Topics

• Dependencies for EFS tools
• Supported distributions
• Manually installing the Amazon EFS client
• Automatically installing or updating Amazon EFS client using AWS Systems Manager
• Installing and upgrading botocore
• Upgrading stunnel

Dependencies for EFS tools

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 EFS mount helper with Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mount helper enforces certificate hostname checking. The EFS 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 EFS file system using TLS fails.

After you've installed the amazon-efs-utils package, upgrade 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 Automatically installing or updating Amazon EFS client using AWS Systems Manager.

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 2 (AL2)	rpm	systemd
CentOS 7, 8	rpm	systemd
Amazon Linux (AL1) 2017.09 Note Amazon Linux (AL1) AMI reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2023 and is not supported for amazon-efs-utils packages released in April 2024 or later (version 2.0 and later).	rpm	upstart
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.