aws cli in cygwin - how to clean up differences in windows and cygwin style paths

Question

I suspect this is my ineptitude in getting path variables set right, but I\'m at a loss.

I\'ve installed the aws cli using pip in cygwin.

pip install aws         


        

Answer 1

After a LOT of time spent on this, I found a solution that works.

The primary issue is that the cygwin didn't come with python installed, and doesn't know where to find the existing Windows Anaconda version on your machine. This can be verified by running which python from within cygwin - it couldn't find where python is saved. Note that this can be confusing because running pip install awscli likely doesn't throw an error message. Cygwin actually installs awscli in the Window's Anaconda installation of Python (I find this odd since we didn't run conda install awscli).

HOWEVER, rather than try to point cygwin to the already installed version of Anaconda python on your machine it will save you a ton of headache to just install a cygwin-specific instance of python. The steps to do so are documented here: http://wiki.fast.ai/index.php/Awscli_in_cygwin

1. pip uninstall awscli
2. wget rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg
3. install apt-cyg /bin
4. apt-cyg install python
5. wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
6. python get-pip.py
7. pip install awscli

...Note, however, that the first command pip uninstall awscli "hung up" for me. So just escape out of it using quit() and continue with the others in order.

You can check that everything worked if you run which python in cygwin and it points to the cygin version (i.e. /usr/bin/python , as opposed to: /users/.../Anaconda2/).

Additionally, if you happen to be asking this in conjunction with watching the setup video for the fast.ai course (http://course.fast.ai/lessons/aws.html), then the next step is CRITICAL for Windows users: when you download all the shell scripts from Github setup folder (https://github.com/fastai/courses/tree/master/setup), Windows automatically adds CRLF line terminators! Therefore, in cygwin, run the following commands to remove these line endings:

1. apt-cyg install dos2unix
2. dos2unix setup_p2.sh
3. dos2unix setup_instance.sh
4. then finally, bash setup_p2.sh

This should do the trick.