Is it possible to install aws-cli package without root permission?

Question

As title suggested, I haven't been able to find a good way to install aws-cli (https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/) without having the root access (or equivalent of sudo privileges).

The way Homebrew setup on Mac is hinting at it may be possible, provided that a few directories and permissions are set in a way to facility future installs. However, I have yet to find any approach in Linux (specially, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS distroes).

I am also aware of SCL from RHEL (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Developer_Guide/scl-utils.html) But again, it requires sudo.

Answer 1

For AWS CLI v2, the recommended solution is passing options -i and -b when installing indicating directories for which user has write permissions.

Example:

[user@localhost ~]$ cd Downloads
[user@localhost Downloads]$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
[user@localhost Downloads]$ unzip awscliv2.zip
[user@localhost Downloads]$ ./aws/install -i ~/aws-cli -b ~/aws-cli/bin

From Amazon Web Service's documentation:

You can install without sudo if you specify directories that you already have write permissions to. Use the following instructions for the install command to specify the installation location:

• Ensure that the paths you provide to the -i and -b parameters contain no volume name or directory names that contain any space characters or other white space characters. If there is a space, the installation fails.

• --install-dir or -i – This option specifies the directory to copy all of the files to.

  The default value is /usr/local/aws-cli.

• --bin-dir or -b – This option specifies that the main aws program in the install directory is symbolically linked to the file aws in the specified path. You must have write permissions to the specified directory. Creating a symlink to a directory that is already in your path eliminates the need to add the install directory to the user's $PATH variable.

  The default value is /usr/local/bin.

(I believe the accepted answer is outdated in that it only works for AWS CLI v1.)

Answer 2

There's a bundled installer for that purpose.

Install aws command to $HOME/bin

$ wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cli/awscli-bundle.zip
$ unzip awscli-bundle.zip
$ ./awscli-bundle/install -b ~/bin/aws

Set $PATH environment variable

$ echo $PATH | grep ~/bin     // See if $PATH contains ~/bin (output will be empty if it doesn't)
$ export PATH=~/bin:$PATH     // Add ~/bin to $PATH if necessary

Test the AWS CLI Installation

$ aws help

See the following link for details: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/awscli-install-bundle.html#install-bundle-user

Answer 3

Obviously, the answers is possible. The trick is to install the whole stack in an alternate location on the host machine.

So altinstall python, then easy_intsall, then pip. Here are the command history in my log.

cd
mkdir installations
cd installations/
curl -O https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7/Python-2.7.tar.bz2
tar xjf Python-2.7.tar.bz2 
cd Python-2.7
mkdir -p ~/usr/local
make altinstall prefix=~/usr/local exec-prefix=~/usr/local
~/usr/local/bin/python2.7 -V
ln -s ~/usr/local/bin/python2.7 ~/usr/local/bin/python
echo "export $PATH=~/usr/local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
cd
mkdir virtualenv
cd virtualenv/
curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
mkdir ~/envs
python virtual-python.py --prefix=~/env/aws
curl -O http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
~/env/aws/bin/python ez_setup.py
echo "export $PATH=~/env/aws/bin:~/usr/local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/env/awscli
source ~/env/awscli/bin/activate
pip -V
pip install awscli

These are helpful links that I followed to help me achieve that goal.

Install Python in an alternate location

Install Python stack without root privilege

Answer 4

You can install without root access with the --user flag to pip:

pip install --user -U awscli

(Hat tip to Etan Reisner who wrote this in a comment).