How to build/install awscli2 on FreeBSD?

[YevheniiPokhvalii]

There are ports for awscli1 for FreeBSD: https://www.freshports.org/devel/awscli
But I cannot find the way to install or build awscli2 on FreeBSD.
Linuxbrew does not have support for FreeBSD either, so it is not possible to get awscli2 from there as well.

Are there any workarounds?

[tim-finnigan]

We don't recommend using third-party packaging/distributions services for installing the AWS CLI. Please refer to this documentation for the official AWS CLI installation instructions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html

[YevheniiPokhvalii]

Well, I could not manage to get it to work on FreeBSD. There is neither FreeBSD support in the official documentation nor in awscliv2 installation scripts.

My question is regarding awscli v2 not awscli v1 because it is possible to install awscli v1 on FreeBSD and it is also available via pip.

[jeheyer]

I'm stuck here too. My plan was just PIP install it, but I get this:

pkg install py39-pip
pip install awscliv2
awscliv2 --install
09:27:26 - awscliv2 - ERROR - FreeBSD amd64 is not supported, use docker version

It's really a bummer. AWS CLI tools should just be a collection of Python scripts, so I'm not sure why they'd stick OS/Platform restrictions on it.

[jeheyer]

Well I see the problem now. Although the bulk of AWS CLI Tools is Python, the entry point is indeed a binary. Fortunately, with some hacking, it is possible to run this via Linux emulation in FreeBSD. I put together a blog post on that:

https://layer77.net/2023/04/07/installing-aws-cli-tools-v2-on-freebsd-12-4/

[dylanneild]

Here is how I got got this working on FreeBSD 14.0-p3. I do not have Linux emulation installed or enabled. This is a pure, native FreeBSD 14 build and install of aws-cli v2.

The following process assumes:

1. You have sudo installed and have privileges to use it.
2. You want aws to be installed globally in the system (/usr/local/bin)

Of course if you just want a local / user install you're free to remove the sudo from step 5 and 6. If you do this, you will also need to alias python3.9 to python as the aws script assumes the Python interpreter is simply python.

1. Make sure you have the pre-requisites installed on FreeBSD:

% sudo pkg install git curl python39 py39-pip py39-sqlite3 cmake gmake rust gcc groff

4. Clone the source tree and checkout the v2 branch:

%  git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-cli.git
%  cd aws-cli
%  git checkout v2

5. Globally install all pre-requisites:

% sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

6. Build and install aws, making sure to specify the gcc compiler for any C/C++ binary compilation.

%  sudo CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc pip install -e .

The build will take some time and will execute various backend dependency builds. This include C and Rust compilation. You'll know it's working if the c compiler process being used during the build is cc1.

Specifying the gcc compiler here is critical, as there is presently a bug in clang 16.0.6 (the default compiler on FreeBSD 14) which breaks compilation of at least one dependency. Note that his bug has been fixed by the FreeBSD team, but hasn't been deployed to package updates as I write this.

By the time you read this guide you may be able to remove gcc from the package dependence above and simply run sudo pip install -e .

For more details, see:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=271531

If all goes well, you'll get:

Successfully built awscli
Installing collected packages: wcwidth, urllib3, ruamel.yaml.clib, python-dateutil, pycparser, prompt-toolkit, jmespath, docutils, distro, awscrt, ruamel.yaml, cffi, cryptography, awscli
Successfully installed awscli-2.15.19 awscrt-0.19.19 cffi-1.16.0 cryptography-40.0.1 distro-1.8.0 docutils-0.19 jmespath-1.0.1 prompt-toolkit-3.0.38 pycparser-2.21 python-dateutil-2.8.2 ruamel.yaml-0.17.21 ruamel.yaml.clib-0.2.7 urllib3-1.26.18 wcwidth-0.2.13

You can now access aws as expected:

% aws --version
aws-cli/2.15.19 Python/3.9.18 FreeBSD/14.0-RELEASE-p3 source/amd64 prompt/off

Note that by doing the global package install in step 5, you may be walking on existing py39-xxxxx packages installed on the system, such as py39-six and py39-urllib3. Someone could probably figure out if some of these can be installed via pkg install rather than the global pip install process.

For my setup, I just wanted a working backup server running awscli and didn't need any other python apps.

Hope this helps someone out.

[samos667]

Thanks my savior ! That work perfectly !

# aws --version
aws-cli/2.15.36 Python/3.9.18 FreeBSD/13.1-RELEASE-p9 source/amd64 prompt/off