AWS CLI is the Amazon Web Services command line interface tool, the new unified utility to manage your cloudy Amazon things.
People are usually told to install it with pip install awscli (including in the official docs), but this is a hateable solution for Linux package system fans because
- You get one more package system (pip, for Python packages) where you have to care for updates, and where you will forget just that. Not that it would be any worse than having own package management systems already for Firefox add-ons, Chrome extensions, Gnome extensions, Ruby gems, Drupal modules, and WordPress plugins. All of that is just plain bad. Grrrr.
- You no longer have a single point of control and overview for what software is installed on your system.
So, let's try installing the AWS CLI from packages. Fortunately, there are fairly recent (awscli 1.2.9, from 2014-01) packages for upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr). We are on Ubuntu 13.10 however, but we can fix it by adapting these instructions for Debian to our situation:
- Add a package source for Ubuntu trusty, by adding a line like this (with your Ubuntu mirror) to the bottom of
/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty main universe - Create a preferece for Ubuntu trusty packages that will allow to install them when specifying the distribution, but will not select them automatically even when the version is newer than the local one. For that, create a file
/etc/apt/preferences.d/ubuntu-trusty.prefwith the following content:
Package: *
Pin: release a=trusty
Pin-Priority: 200 - Install
awscliand its dependencies:sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install -t trusty awscli.
You are ready to use it now (try aws --version). Note that they include the functional equivalent of the Amazon EC2 CLI tools, and many more Amazon CLI tools – you will very probably not need to install any Amazon specific CLI tools any more, regardless of what outdated how-tos are telling you.
Also see Amazon's official AWS CLI documentation.
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