Install AWS CodeDeploy Agent on Linux

AWS CodeDeploy Agent is the agent that runs deploy jobs on EC2 instances. Before a CodeDeploy job will run you’ll need to make sure the agent is installed, running, and has the correct IAM permissions to execute.

For more information on AWS CodeDeploy, please see: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/

Installation is straight forward on Linux and will have your agent up and running in no time.

The below example is based on Ubuntu, but the same steps would be used on other distributions, with the exception of the package manager for installing ruby.

As the root user, run the below commands. root is required because the deployment could be performing actions that require elevated privileges. Ruby is an installation dependency for AWS CodeDeploy and must be available before installing the agent itself.

apt update
apt -y install ruby

Once Ruby is installed we can download and install the CodeDeploy agent. The below agent is being downloaded from the eu-central-1 region, but you can replace the region with your local region if required. Other than saving bandwidth charges for the download (which will be tiny) there is no real reason to do so.

cd /tmp
wget https://aws-codedeploy-eu-central-1.s3.amazonaws.com/latest/install;
chmod +x ./install

./install auto

The final step is to start the agent and check that it’s running. A systemd entry will be added and needs to be called to start the agent.

service codedeploy-agent start

Finally, check that the agent is running by checking the log. You should be looking for a similar output to the below.

tail -f /var/log/aws/codedeploy-agent/codedeploy-agent.log

2019-11-24 07:30:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31022)]: master 31017: Spawned child 1/1
2019-11-24 07:30:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31022)]: On Premises config file does not exist or not readable
2019-11-24 07:30:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31022)]: InstanceAgent::Plugins::CodeDeployPlugin::CommandExecutor: Archives to retain is: 5}
2019-11-24 07:30:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31022)]: Version file found in /opt/codedeploy-agent/.version with agent version OFFICIAL_1.0-1.1597_deb.
2019-11-24 07:30:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31017)]: Started master 31017 with 1 children
2019-11-24 07:31:54 INFO  [codedeploy-agent(31022)]: [Aws::CodeDeployCommand::Client 200 61.547075 0 retries] poll_host_command(host_identifier:"xxxx")

See here for the installation steps combined into a single script.