How do I update aws cli from v1 to v2 on Ubuntu? Amazon's official instructions don't work

Question

I am running Ubuntu under WSL2 on Windows 11 and building an AWS CDK project. I recently discovered that I needed to update my AWS CLI from version 1 to 2. I followed the letter the official AWS documentation, but it didn't work. After following it and running aws --version, it is still showing the following (thus indicating that I am still running under v1):

aws-cli/1.22.34 Python/3.10.12 Linux/4.4.0-22621-Microsoft botocore/1.34.43

I tried everything again, and after downloading the package and executing sudo ./aws/install, I get the message: Found same AWS CLI version: /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/2.15.27. Skipping install.

So the above error is saying I already have v2 installed, which is in contradiction to what I see when I run aws --version.

Why is this happening? I expected that upgrading my aws cli version would be a simple one-line command (i.e. just like updating npm). Why did Amazon have to make this so complicated?

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Run

/usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/bin/aws --version

and you can verify that you have v2 installed and running.

The problem is that your PATH contains v1 before, so when you run just aws that's the version found.