AWS CLI (Command Line Interface), installation on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

About AWS CLI

In the next article we are going to take a look at the AWS Command Line Interface. The AWS or Amazon Web Service command line interface is a command line tool for manage our Amazon web services.

AWS CLI provides direct access to the Amazon Web Services public API. As it is a command line tool, it can also be used to create scripts to automate your Amazon web services. In this article we are going to see two ways to install the AWS CLI tool on our Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Installing the AWS CLI on Ubuntu 18.04

With APT

AWS CLI is available in the official Ubuntu 18.04 LTS package repository. Therefore, it is very easy to install it. First we update the package listing cache with the following command in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo apt-get update

Now we are going to install the AWS CLI using the command:

AWS CLi installation with apt

sudo apt-get install awscli

After this, the program should already be installed on our system. We will can check if AWS CLI is working correctly with the following command:

aws --version

As you can see in the following screenshot, the AWS CLI is working correctly.

AWS CLI version

With Python PIP

AWS CLI is a Python module. The advantage of installing AWS CLI as a Python module is that always Get an updated version of the AWS CLI. It's easy to update the AWS CLI if it's installed as a Python module. We also won't need root privileges to install the AWS CLI in this way. If we need it, AWS CLI too can be installed in a virtual Python environment.

AWS CLI is available for Python 2.x and Python 3.x. For this example I will use version 3 of Python. As I say, we will need Python PIP to install this program on our Ubuntu. python pip it is not installed by default on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. But it is easy to install.

Run the following command to install Python PIP:

AWS CLI Python install

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Python PIP should be installed. Now we will be able install AWS CLI using PIP with the following command in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

pip install AWS CLI

pip3 install awscli --upgrade --user

The AWS CLI Python module must be installed and we can check if this is the case by typing:

python AWSCLI Version

python3 -m awscli --version

As you can see, the AWS CLI has also successfully installed the latest version using Python.

AWS CLI Basics

I'd like to show you how the AWS CLI works in a practical way, but I haven't verified my AWS account. That is why the data that I will use is obtained from a screenshot that I found in an image search from Google. Each user will have to replace the data shown here with your own.

For this exercise I am using the AWS CLI program from the LTS packaged version of Ubuntu 18.04, not the Python module, but the commands are similar.

When we want to log into the AWS account using the AWS CLI, first we must configure the client with the credentials of our AWS account. To do this, run the following command:

aws configure

If you have used the AWS CLI Python module uses this other:

python -m awscli configure

After this, we will have to type our AWS passkey ID and press Enter. The next thing it will ask us to do is type our AWS secret access key ID and press Enter. A passkey ID and a secret passkey ID can be created from AWS Management Console.

AWS CLI configuration

We will also have to type in our default region name. It is something like us-west-2 in this example.

Now we will write our default output format. We can choose between the default value, in which case we will only have to press Enter. Or we can also select the JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation), in which case we'll type json and hit Enter.

Now we can manage our Amazon Web Services using the AWS CLI.

The AWS CLI configuration files they are stored in ~ / .aws / config and ~ / .aws / credentials, as you can see in the following screenshot.

AWS CLI saved credentials

Now when we need to use a different login information, all we will have to do is delete the configuration files mentioned above and run the following command.

rm -v ~/.aws/config ~/.aws/credentials

We will end up executing again the configuration of the program that we have seen before.

Help with the AWS CLI

If anyone needs to know how to get help with this program, AWS has a great guide and quite a bit of documentation that users can use. To consult the help from the terminal we can execute in it:

AWS CLI Help

aws help

If we choose to install the Python module, the help command would be:

python3 -m awscli help

For more information, we can consult the online documentation AWS CLI. In addition we can also download the PDF manual Of this program.


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