Issues With Installation Instructions: CodeBuild, --user flag, LinuxBrew

[jkodroff]

I think the installation instructions can be significantly simplified if the --user option is removed from the PIP installation instructions:

1. When installing on a dev machine, it's unlikely that allowing multiple versions of SAM side-by-side would be helpful.
2. When attempting to set up a CodeBuild buildspec.yml, the --user flag is downright harmful because it installs the sam executable to a location not in PATH and it is not especially clear how to get it in PATH. Also, in a build container, there would be no reason to use the --user flag anyway.

I feel more strongly about the second point than the first as it cost me several hours in trying to set up an all-AWS-tools pipeline for a serverless project.

It's also worth noting that, probably because CodeBuild container commands run as root, the setup script for LinuxBrew fails. Considering that LinuxBrew brings down Ruby as a dependency, I'm unsure whether this really should be the preferred option. I assume this choice was made so as not to require writing separate sets of instructions for apt-get and yum, or, alternatively, because SAM does not publish packages for these package managers. I think SAM should publish these packages if it does not already.

This is a working minimal configuration for a CodeBuild container. I'll be happy to add this if someone tells me where it would belong:

version: 0.2
phases:
  install:
    commands:
      - pip install aws-sam-cli
  build:
    commands:
      - sam build

[jkodroff]

@sanathkr, thought you might also be interested in my feedback above.

[sanathkr]

Thanks for sharing feedback. It makes sense. The --user flag was primarily to prevent needing sudo on dev workstations.

We want to publish to apt-get, yum etc but don't yet have it implemented. If you know how or have scripts for it, please do send a PR. It would be a great addition.

I am going to move this issue to SAM CLI repo because that is where it belongs.

[sanathkr]

@mark-hirayama Can you move this Issue to SAM CLI repo?

[jkodroff]

@sanathkr Thanks for the rapid response! The main issue for me was struggling to get CodeBuild working. I'd love for AWS to take a closer look at making sure there's a well-written, single source of docs on using SAM with CodeSuite because it's... well... all AWS' tooling. ;)

Happy to contribute feedback from this project both as I go along and at the end.

I am woefully ignorant of authoring packages, but I don't think it would take too long to learn based off a solid example: https://github.com/jen20/hashidays-nyc/tree/master/packaging/deb-vault

Packages should also include something for Windows using Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org

I can say firsthand that Chocolatey packages are easy to write, especially if you're familar with NuGet (.NET's packaging system) as they use the same format.

[sanathkr]

💯Thanks for the doc feedback.

Thanks for the examples. We have a MSI installer for Windows, but chocolatey will be good to add.

Have you written chocolatey packages before? Can it vend Python tools thru Chocolatey?

[joshbean]

Closing this issue or pull request in advance of archiving this repo. For more information about the decision to archive this repo (and others in the "awsdocs" org), see the announcement on the AWS News Blog.