“Could not find AWS CLI” in the AWS Toolkit — what it means

Updated 17 August 2026

The message usually appears as "Could not find AWS CLI. Install a local copy." It does not mean your credentials are wrong.

What needs the CLI and what does not

Some Toolkit features shell out to the AWS CLI or SAM CLI — local build, local invoke, and deployment flows in particular. Plain read operations against AWS APIs do not need a CLI at all; they use the SDK inside the IDE.

So if you are only reading logs, listing buckets, or watching a stack, a missing CLI is not the real blocker.

Fixing it

  1. Confirm the CLI exists and is on PATH: run aws --version in a terminal outside the IDE.
  2. If that works but the IDE disagrees, the IDE was started with a different PATH. On macOS, launching from Spotlight/Dock does not read your shell profile. Quit the IDE and relaunch it from a terminal, or set the path explicitly in the Toolkit settings.
  3. If it genuinely is not installed, install the official AWS CLI and restart the IDE.

If you only need to read

Read-only tools do not require any CLI on your machine. They read your existing ~/.aws/config profiles and call AWS directly from the IDE.

Disclosure

These guides are written by sellerkit. We publish JetBrains IDE plugins for AWS, and the ones relevant to this page are listed below. Everything above works whether or not you use them.

Our plugins declare no upper IDE build limit, and each release is run through the JetBrains Plugin Verifier against multiple IDE versions before it ships.