I had been running AWS CLI v2 on FreeBSD for a while, and it stopped working after I updated to the latest release. I checked out v2.34.3 from the awscli v2 repo, installed the dependencies from requirements.txt, making sure there were no conflicts with locally installed packages — in particular awscrt, where I used the latest available version as specified in the requirements. The aws command itself ran fine:

» aws --version
aws-cli/2.34.3 Python/3.11.14 FreeBSD/15.0-RELEASE-p2 source/amd64

But as soon as it needed to do anything real, it fell apart:

» aws configure sso

aws: [ERROR]: module '_awscrt' has no attribute 'set_log_level'

A bit of digging showed awscrt/io.py calling _awscrt.set_log_level(log_level).

For some context, the awscrt package is the AWS Common Runtime binding for Python, and it’s split into two parts. The pure Python layer lives in the awscrt package and handles the high-level API. The actual work is done by _awscrt, a C extension compiled as a library (a .so file) which on a typical FreeBSD + Python 3.11 setup would live at /usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_awscrt.abi3.so.

I had manually installed awscrt==0.31.2, the latest release at the time of writing, and also exactly the version pinned in awscli’s requirements.txt. Still, the error persisted. The Python wrapper was clearly calling something the .so didn’t expose.

The clue came from checking where Python was actually loading things from:

» python3 -c "import awscrt; print(awscrt.__version__, awscrt.__file__)"
0.31.2 /usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/awscrt/__init__.py
» python3 -c "import _awscrt; print(_awscrt.__file__)"
/home/myuser/.local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_awscrt.abi3.so

There it is. The Python part of awscrt was correctly loading from the system-wide site-packages. But _awscrt, the compiled extension, was being pulled from my user’s local site-packages. Probably a leftover from a previous install that I hadn’t properly cleaned up.

After removing the dangling file from ~/.local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/, the check came back clean:

» python3 -c "import _awscrt; print(_awscrt.__file__)"
/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_awscrt.abi3.so

And with that, aws configure sso ran without complaint.