Installing AWS CLI on Solaris 10

A (former) colleague needed to transfer an Oracle Data Pump file to Amazon S3 (in order to allow Amazon RDS Oracle to import said Data Pump file), but the origination server was running Oracle Solaris and the customer needed the AWS CLI on that server. AWS documentation has no steps for installation of the AWS CLI on Solaris, so I decided to write up this short note.

The test system I used for validation was a SunFire V100 (a circa-2003 Sun SPARC machine with a single-core, single-socket UltraSPARC IIi clocked at 650MHz, and probably slower than a Raspberry Pi). This test system was running Oracle Solaris 10 update 11 (from here) with the CPU OS Patchset 2018/01 Solaris 10 SPARC.

Output of uname -a is

SunOS v100.local 5.10 Generic_150400-59 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2

The first required step is to install a later version of Python (even with the 2018/01 patchset, Solaris 10 comes with Python 2.6.4 which is far too old). Note that this Python package is from OpenCSW Solaris Packages, which is a third party. Enterprise customers would need to have their security teams validate whether OpenCSW is a permissible source of packages.

pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now

/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -U

/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -y -i python27

Once Python 2.7 is installed, you can then download the AWS CLI, version 1 (note that support even for Python 2.7 in the AWS CLI is ending very soon, mid-2021 at the time of this writing, so a specific AWS CLI version that does support Python 2.7 must be used). Note that we have to use a particular switch with wget because the version of wget that comes with Solaris 10 is very old and does not recognize the SSL certificate from Amazon S3.

wget --no-check-certificate "https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cli/awscli-bundle-1.19.24.zip"

unzip awscli-bundle-1.19.24.zip

We can then install the AWS CLI, but we need to make sure the right version of Python is used, i.e. it must be ahead of the system Python in the path.

export PATH=/opt/csw/bin:$PATH

./awscli-bundle/install -i /usr/local/aws -b /usr/local/bin/aws

After the installer completes, the AWS CLI is successfully installed, and you can configure credentials as appropriate.