Installing AWS CLI on Mac

Recently I started exploring Amazon Web Services. Day by day I am becoming a big fan of cloud technologies. To start with, in this article I am posting a few steps which I did to setup Amazon Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). AWS CLI is a unified tool for managing  different AWS Services. With one tool we can control and manage services given by amazon. To explore more on controlling services through CLI, you can refer to you can refer to the documentation.

In this article I'm gonna describe you the steps I've done to configure AWS CLI. To install, we need to have 'pip' a package manager for python.
Installation Requirement
For installing AWS CLI we need to have the following:

• Python 2 version 2.6.5+ or Python 3 version 3.3+.
• Windows, Linux, MAC or Unix. In my case I'm only configuring for MAC PC.

Installing pip

Download get-pip.py from this location. Once you download get-pip.py, you need to run the script with following command.

python get-pip.py.

You may need root privilege since it is copying some files outside user's home directory.
Installing CLI
once installed pip, you can directly run the following command

$ pip install --upgrade --user awscli

Here --upgrade tells pip to upgrade any features that are already installed. --user option tells pip to install the program to a subdirectory of user directory to avoid modifying OS based libraries.

Instead of the above, you can use brew installer as well:

brew install awscli

After installation the path for aws will be inside ~/Library/Python/2.7/bin

We may need to configure path for global access

Configuring Environment Variable

Update your shell profile. For me I need to update bash_profile. So I use vi ~/.bash_profile. Append :~/.local/bin  with $PATH.

So thats it... Now if you open a new terminal, you can type aws command.