Manually installing and uninstalling SSM Agent on EC2 instances for Linux

Before you manually install AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Linux operating system, review the following information.

SSM Agent installation file URLs

You can access the installation files for SSM Agent that are stored in any commercial AWS 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 AWS 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 AWS. For information, see Find AMIs with the SSM Agent preinstalled.

Installation on other machine types

If you need to install the agent on an on-premises server or a virtual machine (VM) so that it can be used with Systems Manager, see How to install the SSM Agent on hybrid Linux nodes. For information about installing the agent on edge devices, see Managing edge devices with Systems Manager.

Keeping the agent up to date

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new capabilities are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing capabilities. Failing to use the latest version of the agent can prevent your managed node from using various Systems Manager capabilities 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 page on GitHub to get notifications about SSM Agent updates.

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:

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