Local Setup Prerequisites

AWS Session Manager Plugin

Required for aws ssm start-session (both interactive shell access and port-forwarding sessions) against platform instances. This is a local CLI plugin, not part of the AWS CLI itself, and it is not committed to this repo — install it once per machine:

curl "https://s3.amazonaws.com/session-manager-downloads/plugin/latest/ubuntu_64bit/session-manager-plugin.deb" \
  -o "session-manager-plugin.deb"
sudo dpkg -i session-manager-plugin.deb

Verify:

session-manager-plugin

Should print a version/usage message, not “command not found.”

(For non-Ubuntu/WSL environments, see the official AWS docs for the appropriate package: Session Manager Plugin installation instructions.)