Manually installing and uninstalling SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Linux
Before you manually install Amazon Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Linux operating system, review the following information.
Installation on other machine types
The procedures in this section are designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances.
For on-premises servers, virtual machines, or other non-EC2 environments, use
the ssm-setup-cli tool as described in How to install the SSM Agent on hybrid Linux nodes.
Using EC2 installation procedures on non-EC2 systems can potentially result in
security vulnerabilities. The ssm-setup-cli tool provides
additional security protections for non-EC2 machines.
SSM Agent installation file URLs
You can access the installation files for SSM Agent that are stored in any commercial Amazon Web Services Region. We also provide installation files in a globally available Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you can use as an alternative or backup source of files.
If you're manually installing the agent on a instance or two, you can use the commands in the Quick installation procedures we provide to save time. The commands provided in these procedures can also be passed to Amazon EC2 instances as scripts through user data.
If you're creating a script or template to use for installing the agent on multiple instances, we recommend that you use the installation files in or near an Amazon Web Services Region where you're geographically located. For bulk installations, this can increase the speed of your downloads and reduce latency. In these cases, we recommend using the Create custom installation commands procedures in the installation topics.
Amazon Machine Images with the agent preinstalled
SSM Agent is preinstalled on some Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) provided by Amazon. For information, see Find AMIs with the SSM Agent preinstalled.
Keeping the agent up to date
An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new tools are added to Systems Manager or
updates are made to existing tools. Failing to use the latest version of the agent can
prevent your managed node from using various Systems Manager tools and features. For that reason, we
recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up to date on your machines. For
information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. Subscribe to the SSM Agent
Release Notes
Choose your operating system
To view the procedure for manually installing SSM Agent on the specified operating system, choose a link from the following list:
Note
For a list of supported versions of each of the following operating systems, see Supported operating systems for Systems Manager.
Uninstalling SSM Agent from Linux instances
Use the package manager for your operating system to uninstall SSM Agent from Linux instances. Depending on the operating system, the uninstall command will be similar to the following example command:
sudo dpkg -r amazon-ssm-agent