How to Install AWS CLI on Windows and Ubuntu: A Step-by-Step Guide

As a developer who has spent time working with Linux, I was excited to transition to Windows as my primary development machine. However, I soon realized that many of the tools I relied on in Linux were not available by default on Windows. In this article, I'll share my experience installing AWS CLI on both Windows and Ubuntu using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Before getting started, make sure you have Python 2.X.X and 3.X.X installed on your machine, either natively or through WSL.

If you're like me and prefer to work in a Linux environment, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This will give you a Linux 'environment' that you can use alongside PowerShell.

Once I had WSL set up, I was able to install NPM and other tools, including the awscli, GIT, and more. One of the key steps in this process was ensuring that Python was installed correctly and added to my system's PATH variable.

As someone who uses Python for a variety of tasks, I wanted to make sure that I could duplicate my environment on Windows so that I wouldn't have to struggle with the same issues again. To do this, I made sure to install both versions of Python (2.X.X and 3.X.X) as well as pip, which is separate from Python itself.

When I first started using my Windows machine, I noticed that many tools came pre-installed on Linux but not on Windows. This included Python, which is already installed and ready to use on Linux. To get around this, I had to install Python manually on Windows.

Finally, I encountered an issue when trying to install the Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface (awscli) on WSL. Despite my best efforts, I kept getting errors until I realized that I needed to add the awscli executable to my system's PATH variable.

In this article, I've shared my experience installing AWS CLI on both Windows and Ubuntu using WSL. Whether you're a Linux user who is new to Windows or simply looking for a way to duplicate your development environment across different machines, these steps should help you get started.

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