AWS CLI: Install AWS CLI – Ubuntu Linux

The AWS CLI is a tool for managing the AWS services from the command-line.

The easiest way to install the AWS CLI on Ubuntu is to get it from the official repository but the version you will get will be much older than the latest one.

In this note i will show how to install the latest version or any specific version of AWS CLI on Linux.

Cool Tip: List Amazon S3 buckets and objects using AWS CLI! Read more →

Install AWS CLI

The easiest way to install the AWC CLI on Ubuntu is to install it from the official repository:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install awscli

The disadvantage of this method of installation is that you will get the version of AWS CLI that will be much older than the latest one.

Install the latest version of the AWS CLI v2:

$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
$ unzip awscliv2.zip
$ sudo ./aws/install

To install a specific version of the AWS CLI v2, append a hyphen and the version number to the filename, for example:

$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64-2.0.52.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
$ unzip awscliv2.zip
$ sudo ./aws/install

The list of the released versions of AWS CLI can be found here.

To verify that the AWS CLI has installed correctly, run:

$ aws --version

Install AWS CLI without Sudo

To install AWS CLI without sudo you should specify the installation directories that you have write permissions to, for example:

$ mkdir -p ~/local/bin
$ ./aws/install -i ~/local/aws-cli -b ~/local/bin

Add the AWS CLI installation directory to the user’s $PATH variable to be able to execute the aws command without specifying the full path:

$ export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/local/bin

To make this change permanent, add the PATH=$PATH:$HOME/local/bin line to the ~/.profile file:

$ nano ~/.profile
$ tail -n1 ~/.profile
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/local/bin

To verify that the AWS CLI has installed correctly, run:

$ aws --version

Uninstall AWS CLI

Locate the symlink and install paths:

$ which aws
/usr/local/bin/aws
$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/aws
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root /usr/local/bin/aws -> /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/bin/aws

Delete the symlinks and the install directory:

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/aws
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/aws_completer
$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/aws-cli

If the AWS CLI was installed on Ubuntu using the apt or apt-get commands, to uninstall it, simply run:

$ sudo apt auto-remove awscli
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