Installing the Amazon EFS client - Amazon Elastic File System
Dependencies for EFS toolsSupported distributions

Installing the Amazon EFS client

We recommend that you install the Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils), an open-source collection of tools for Amazon EFS. The Amazon EFS client includes a mount helper, which is a program that helps simplify mounting EFS file systems. The client also enables the ability to use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor an EFS file system's mount status, and it includes tooling that makes it easier to perform encryption of data in transit for Amazon EFS file systems.

You can manually install the Amazon EFS client on Amazon EC2 instances running supported distributions. For certain supported operating systems, you can alternatively configure AWS Systems Manager to automatically install or update the package. For a list of distributions that you can use with AWS Systems Manager, see Systems Manager Distributor supported operating systems.

Topics

Dependencies for EFS tools

The following dependencies exist for amazon-efs-utils and are installed when you install the amazon-efs-utils package:

  • NFS client

    • nfs-utils for RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, and Fedora distributions

    • nfs-common for Debian and Ubuntu distributions

  • Network relay (stunnel package, version 4.56 or later)

  • Python (version 3.4 or later)

  • OpenSSL 1.0.2 or newer

Note

By default, when using the EFS mount helper with Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mount helper enforces certificate hostname checking. The EFS mount helper uses the stunnel program for its TLS functionality. Some versions of Linux don't include a version of stunnel that supports these TLS features by default. When using one of those Linux versions, mounting an EFS file system using TLS fails.

After you've installed the amazon-efs-utils package, upgrade stunnel. See Upgrading stunnel.

You can use AWS Systems Manager to manage Amazon EFS clients and automate the tasks required to install or update the amazon-efs-utils package on your EC2 instances. For more information, see Automatically installing or updating Amazon EFS client using AWS Systems Manager.

For issues with encryption, see Troubleshooting encryption.

Supported distributions

The Amazon EFS client has been verified against the following Linux and Mac distributions:

DistributionPackage typeinit system
Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) rpm systemd
Amazon Linux 2 (AL2)rpmsystemd
CentOS 8rpmsystemd
Amazon Linux (AL1) 2017.09
Note

Amazon Linux (AL1) AMI reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2023 and is not supported for amazon-efs-utils packages released in April 2024 or later (version 2.0 and later).

rpm upstart
Debian 11debsystemd
Fedora 29 - 32rpmsystemd
macOS Big Surlaunchd
macOS Montereylaunchd
macOS Ventura launchd
macOS Sonoma launchd
OpenSUSE Leap, Tumbleweedrpmsystemd
Oracle8 rpm systemd
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, 8, 9rpmsystemd
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12, 15rpmsystemd
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTSdebsystemd

For a complete list of supported distributions that the package has been verified against, see the amazon-efs-utils README on Github.