Manually install SSM Agent on Amazon Linux instances - AWS Systems Manager

Manually install SSM Agent on Amazon Linux instances

Connect to your Amazon Linux instance and perform the following steps to install SSM Agent. Perform these steps on each instance that will run commands using Systems Manager.

Important

This topic provides commands for working with SSM Agent on Amazon Linux instances. Some of these commands are not supported on Amazon Linux 2 instances. Before continuing, ensure you are viewing the correct topic for your instance type. For commands to run on Amazon Linux 2 instances, see Manually install SSM Agent on Amazon Linux 2 instances.

Before you begin

Before you install SSM Agent on an Amazon Linux instance, note the following:

  • SSM Agent is installed, by default, on Amazon Linux base AMIs dated 2017.09 and later. SSM Agent is also installed, by default, on Amazon Linux 2 AMIs. You must manually install SSM Agent on other versions of Linux.

  • Instances created from an Amazon Linux AMI that are using a proxy must be running a current version of the Python requests module in order to support Patch Manager operations. For more information, see Upgrade the Python requests module on Amazon Linux instances that use a proxy server.

  • If you use a yum command to update SSM Agent on a managed instance after the agent has been installed or updated using the SSM document AWS-UpdateSSMAgent, you might see the following message: "Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum." This message is expected and can be safely ignored.

To install SSM Agent on Amazon Linux

Use one of the following commands to download and run the SSM Agent installer.

region represents the identifier for an AWS Region supported by AWS Systems Manager, such as us-east-2 for the US East (Ohio) Region. For a list of supported region values, see the Region column in Systems Manager service endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference. 

sudo yum install -y https://s3.region.amazonaws.com/amazon-ssm-region/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm
 
sudo yum install -y https://s3.region.amazonaws.com/amazon-ssm-region/latest/linux_386/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm
 
sudo yum install -y https://s3.region.amazonaws.com/amazon-ssm-region/latest/linux_arm64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm
Note

If you're unable to download the agent from the Region you specify, use one of the global URLs below. Note that even though the following URLs show 'ec2-downloads-windows', these are the correct URLs for Linux operating systems.

  • Intel 64-bit (x86_64)

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm

  • Intel 32-bit (x86)

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_386/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm

  • ARM 64-bit (arm64)

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_arm64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm

After installing the agent, run the following command to determine if the SSM Agent is running on your Amazon Linux instance. The command should return the message amazon-ssm-agent is running. 

sudo status amazon-ssm-agent

If the previous command returns the message amazon-ssm-agent is stopped, run the following commands: 

sudo start amazon-ssm-agent
sudo status amazon-ssm-agent
Important

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new capabilities are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing capabilities. If an older version of the agent is running on an instance, some SSM Agent processes can fail. For that reason, we recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up-to-date on your instances. For information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. To be notified about SSM Agent updates, subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes page on GitHub.