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The essential guide to installing Amazon Q Developer CLI on Windows

Ricardo Sueiras on March 31, 2025

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 thos...

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kowalsk • Jul 12

This is great, thank you for taking the time to do this, it got me started in no time :)

Divyansh Kumar • Aug 30

Thanks for your help! Great learning from you.

Ricardo Sueiras AWS • Aug 31

Thank you!

Uhsarp A • Aug 8

It worked fine when I installed it yesterday.
Today when I try to open chat, it asked for login. While logging in, I get this error

q/bin$ q login ✔ Select login method · Use for Free with Builder ID error: dispatch failure

Ricardo Sueiras AWS • Aug 8

Ok a couple of things to try. First of all, can you try "q logout" and then try and login from scratch to see if that fixes the issue. If that does not work, can you see if you are running the latest version of Q CLI, which you can find by running "q update". If you are running the latest version, then the only other thing I can think of is that it might be a service degradation issue. If you can try later and see if you get the same error and let me know.

Ricardo Sueiras AWS • Aug 8

Mmmm, I will check this out. Not seen that message before.

HP-85 • Aug 14

Great article - thank you!

The instructions in the Q CLI User Guide - Installing with a zip file - seems to work for installing on WSL in both Windows 11 x64 and arm64.

Here's an example of using Q CLI from WSL to interact with Windows:

> how do I query windows system event log for event ID 6009

> You can query the Windows System Event Log for event ID 6009 from WSL using PowerShell. Here are several approaches:
## Using Get-WinEvent (recommended)
bash
powershell.exe -Command "Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; ID=6009}"

 ● I will run the following shell command:
powershell.exe -Command "Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; ID=6009}"
 ⋮
 ↳ Purpose: Query Windows System Event Log for event ID 6009 using PowerShell Get-WinEvent
Allow this action? Use 't' to trust (always allow) this tool for the session. [y/n/t]:
> y
   ProviderName: EventLog

TimeCreated                      Id LevelDisplayName Message
-----------                      -- ---------------- -------
8/7/2025 9:41:26 AM            6009 Information      Microsoft (R) Windows (R) 10.00. 22631  Multiprocessor Free.
8/6/2025 12:13:42 PM           6009 Information      Microsoft (R) Windows (R) 10.00. 22631  Multiprocessor Free.
8/5/2025 8:07:40 AM            6009 Information      Microsoft (R) Windows (R) 10.00. 22631  Multiprocessor Free.

Saran Tanpituckpong • Aug 5

No native Windows PowerShell support? 😢

Ricardo Sueiras AWS • Aug 6

No, although if you check out the demo video, you can see that I create powershell scripts within wsl when using Amazon Q CLI, so it is possible just not in the same terminal session. Watch this space though, as there is a native Windows installer on the roadmap, and so hopefully this will come along soon. In the meantime, as this is an open source project I am aware of a few folk who have compiled windows native binaries. Check out this repo and see if this works for you -> github.com/DiscreteTom/amazon-q-de...

Uhsarp A • Aug 8

Nice try. Wnidows defender detects a virus.

Ricardo Sueiras AWS • Aug 8

ahh really, ok I will make sure that I dont recommend that link to others. One colleague tried to run it and said it didnt do anything (just got back to me an hour ago). Man, need to get myself a windows machine.