awscli version 2 on alpine linux

Actually with a bit a effort it is possible to run AWS CLI v2 on Alpine:

ARG ALPINE_VERSION=3.17

FROM alpine:${ALPINE_VERSION}

ARG GLIBC_VERSION=2.35-r0
ARG AWSCLI_VERSION=2.11.11

# install glibc compatibility for alpine
RUN apk --no-cache add \
        binutils \
        curl \
    && curl -sL https://alpine-pkgs.sgerrand.com/sgerrand.rsa.pub -o /etc/apk/keys/sgerrand.rsa.pub \
    && curl -sLO https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc/releases/download/${GLIBC_VERSION}/glibc-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
    && curl -sLO https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc/releases/download/${GLIBC_VERSION}/glibc-bin-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
    && curl -sLO https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc/releases/download/${GLIBC_VERSION}/glibc-i18n-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
    && apk add --no-cache --force-overwrite \
        glibc-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
        glibc-bin-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
        glibc-i18n-${GLIBC_VERSION}.apk \
    && /usr/glibc-compat/bin/localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8 \
    && ln -sf /usr/glibc-compat/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 \
    && curl -sL https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64-${AWSCLI_VERSION}.zip -o awscliv2.zip \
    && unzip awscliv2.zip \
    && aws/install \
    && rm -rf \
        awscliv2.zip \
        aws \
        /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/dist/aws_completer \
        /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/dist/awscli/data/ac.index \
        /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/dist/awscli/examples \
        glibc-*.apk \
    && find /usr/local/aws-cli/v2/current/dist/awscli/botocore/data -name examples-1.json -delete \
    && apk --no-cache del \
        binutils \
        curl \
    && rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*

The above Dockerfile will install the 'glibc' package for Alpine, so that the AWS CLI will be able to find the required shared libraries. The Dockerfile also removes some stuff we probably don't need, such as auto-complete and examples. If you need some other specific packages you can of course add them to the Dockerfile.

AWS has improved the build process, so now it's also possible to build from git with MUSL glibc (kudos to @Julian Bueno):

The following will build v2.15.0 of AWS CLI, which is the latest at the time of this edit (2023-12-12)

ARG ALPINE_VERSION=3.23
FROM python:3.14-alpine${ALPINE_VERSION} AS builder

ARG AWS_CLI_VERSION=2.35.1
RUN apk add --no-cache git unzip groff build-base libffi-dev cmake
RUN git clone --single-branch --depth 1 -b ${AWS_CLI_VERSION} https://github.com/aws/aws-cli.git

WORKDIR aws-cli
RUN ./configure --with-install-type=portable-exe --with-download-deps
RUN make
RUN make install

# reduce image size: remove autocomplete and examples
RUN rm -rf \
    /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/aws_completer \
    /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/awscli/data/ac.index \
    /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/awscli/examples
RUN find /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/awscli/data -name completions-1*.json -delete
RUN find /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/awscli/botocore/data -name examples-1.json -delete

# build the final image
FROM alpine:${ALPINE_VERSION}
COPY --from=builder /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/ /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/
RUN ln -s /usr/local/lib/aws-cli/aws /usr/local/bin/aws

The above reduces the image size even more (from 175MB to 95MB), since we no longer need the glibc-compat hack. Hopefully AWS will also distribute the Alpine binaries, so we do not have to build it ourselves.

Alpine 3.18 includes aws-cli v2 as a 'main' package, so all you need to do is just run apk add aws-cli. One remark on this: The maintainers decided to use the 'dynamically linked' executable, which means it pulls in a ton of Python3 runtime dependencies (179Mb). If you want your images to be as tiny as possible, you can continue to use option #2.