API call to determine the latest version

[NothinRandom]

Describe the feature

An API call to allow end user to determine the latest version of the agent. We can model this call similarly to other teams such as codedeploy or ssm, where running a command similar to this retrieves the latest version curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/VERSION.

Use Case

Downloading the installer can take some time and also consumes unnecessary bandwidth if the agent is already up to date.

One way is to query the change log and grep the 5th line to determine the latest version via:
curl -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/aws-cli/v2/CHANGELOG.rst" | sed -n '5p'

The bruteforce way is to download the latest agent and determine the version after extraction via:

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
./aws/dist/aws --version

As you can notice, neither method seems official for a widely used agent... rather both are workarounds because there is no official way of retrieving the latest version.

Proposed Solution

We can model this call similarly to other teams such as codedeploy or ssm, where a simple and negligible bandwidth consuming call can retrieves the latest version. For example, an end user can retrieve the latest version of AWS SSM via making this call curl -s https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/VERSION which outputs 3.2.582.0. Similarly for codedeploy agent, making this call curl -s "https://aws-codedeploy-us-east-1.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/latest/LATEST_VERSION" outputs {"rpm":"releases/codedeploy-agent-1.5.0-57.noarch.rpm","deb":"releases/codedeploy-agent_1.5.0-57_all.deb","msi":"releases/codedeploy-agent-1.5.0.57.msi"}.

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

CLI version used

2.11.6

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Ubuntu 20.04.x, Ubuntu 22.04.x, Debian 11

[RyanFitzSimmonsAK]

Hi @NothinRandom, thanks for this feature request. When I brought this up with the team, they did mention that all releases have version tags, and that the version is also in the __init__.py. So, you could get the version using something like curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/aws-cli/v2/awscli/__init__.py | find "__version__". Hopefully this workaround is a slight improvement over the changelog for you.

[NothinRandom]

Hey Ryan. I would say that this version to be more work (less improvement I guess) over the change log since you see to grep the line and then sed to replace __version__ and the single quotes. I think I'll stick with the change log for now. Hopefully then team will reconsider and incorporate this feature request down the road like the other AWS services. I guess we can close this ticket for now. Thanks for looking in this!

[Frankgad]

Hi,
actually if the releases page in github was updated properly, the latest version could be easily retrieved from api.github.com
for example: https://api.github.com/repos/hashicorp/terraform/releases/latest

[github-actions]

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