Make aws ssm start-session indicate if session-manager-plugin is not installed

[iboates]

Describe the feature

Simply pint a warning when executing aws ssm start-session ... and ssm-session-manager is not installed

Use Case

I embarrassingly lost several hours today debugging while trying to figure why I could not connect to my instances via SSM on a freshly-installed system, despite backing up and restoring my .aws directory (and all others), only to realize that it was just because I forgot to install the session-manager-plugin

This headache (and future ones for others) could be avoided if the command aws ssm start-session ... Would just print a warning if the session-manager-plugin is not installed. is desperately trying to figure out why all attempts to connect to an instance

Proposed Solution

No response

Other Information

No response

Acknowledgements

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

CLI version used

aws-cli/2.32.9

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Python/3.13.9 Linux/5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 exe/x86_64.ubuntu.24

[RyanFitzSimmonsAK]

Hi @iboates, thanks for reaching out. Could you elaborate on what error you're receiving when you try to connect without the plugin installed? In my testing, the AWS CLI did warn that I did not have the plugin installed.

[ec2-user@ip-10-0-2-23 ~]$ aws ssm start-session --target i-redacted

SessionManagerPlugin is not found. Please refer to SessionManager Documentation here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/console/systems-manager/session-manager-plugin-not-found

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