Installing Amazon Q Developer CLI on Windows using WSL
Following on from my previous post on how to install Amazon Q Developer CLI on Linux environments, I thought I would share a similar guide for those of you using Windows.
Whilst there is no native Windows installation yet, you can install and run Amazon Q Developer CLI on your Windows machines using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or wsl for short. In this post I will walk you through what you need to do.
Installing wsl
You might already have wsl installed on your machine, in which case you can skip this step. If you do not, then Microsoft have put together a [blog post](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/setup/environment) that walks you through this process.
Installing Amazon Q Developer CLI
The steps below are covered in the official [Amazon Q Developer CLI installation documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/command-line-installing.html?trk=fd6bb27a-13b0-4286-8269-c7b1cfaa29f0&sc_channel=el)
From a Windows command shell enter the following command:
wsl -d Ubuntu
This is going to download and install a virtual Ubuntu instance in your wsl environment. If you have already done this in the past, it will just log you into your Ubuntu wsl environment.
Running Amazon Q Developer CLI
The first thing we need to do is install some missing packages that the installation will need. We will use the native package manager of Ubuntu to do this.
sudo apt install unzip
You will see two options for Login method which you can select using the up and down arrow keys. You want to select the first option, “Use for Free with Builder ID”
When you select this option, it will ask you to open a URL in a web browser. Copy the URL, and then open it up in a web browser. You will now need to either create a new Builder ID, or login using an existing Builder ID you might already have.
Hello World
Now that we have Amazon Q Developer installed, we can start using it by starting a new wsl session, and then invoking it using the “q chat” or “q ai” commands.
wsl -d Ubuntu
If you notice that in my session, the default directory is the Windows home directory. If I invoke Amazon Q Developer cli here, then this is going to be its working directory.
q chat
Conclusion
In this post I shared how you can install Amazon Q Developer CLI on your Windows machine using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and showed you how you can get started.
Get started with Amazon Q Developer
You can try Amazon Q Developer CLI for free today, by signing up for a Builder ID and then downloading the app from here.
FAQs
Q: How do I install wsl?
A: You can install wsl by following the instructions in the [Microsoft blog post](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/setup/environment).
Q: How do I install Amazon Q Developer CLI?
A: You can install Amazon Q Developer CLI by following the instructions in the [Amazon Q Developer CLI installation documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/command-line-installing.html?trk=fd6bb27a-13b0-4286-8269-c7b1cfaa29f0&sc_channel=el).
Q: How do I run Amazon Q Developer CLI?
A: You can run Amazon Q Developer CLI by starting a new wsl session and then invoking it using the “q chat” or “q ai” commands.
