Installing AWS CLI on Cygwin

To get AWS CLI working in Cygwin:

  1. Install “python2-pip” with the Cygwin installer (and accept whatever dependencies it brings)
  2. Run “pip2 install awscli
  3. See what you have: “aws --version“, and continue with the usual “aws configure” procedure.

Using AWS CLI is not very fast in this setup however. For example, showing specific Virtual Private Gateway information took over 3 seconds in Cygwin, while it took just over a second on a Debian VM in the same computer. My understanding is that the environment setup just takes some time under Cygwin when running these commands.

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  1. Thank you, this is very helpful. Although in my case it’s pip3.7 and I had to run the Cygwin console as a Windows Administrator.
    Only then I could run aws cli in Cygwin just fine as a non-Administrator Windows user.

  2. Perfect, thank you! Worked for me too. Could not make it working with python3, but 2 made the trick.

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