BASH AWS PROFILE

When having more than one AWS account, switching between different accounts can be painfull. This is super simple, yet pretty efficient, way of handling multiple AWS profiles.

With properly configured AWS-CLI, you can execute commands to various AWS accounts using --profile switch. I personally consider this extremely dangerous approach, because it is really easy to run commands to a completely wrong account. AWS-CLI respects AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE environment parameter, and one can adjust this by "mutating" bash with export AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE=my-profile. Using sub-shells more safe and easy approach because I want to see all the time to which account I'm currently running commands on. That's why we print current AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE to bash prompt.

So this is simply just opens new bash sub shell with AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE and PS1 (bash prompt) set nicely. Bash prompt then displays currently active profile, and you will never run commands to wrong account!

This also works great with MFA authentication, which is essential.

Another feature is aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env, which is intended to use in conjunction with aws-profile. It simply fetches temporary credentials to new bash subshell, and it is primarily intended to use for testing and trying out AWS-SDK based programs, as they tend to read credentials from environment variables such as AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID.

Install

Bash AWS Profile is developed with os x, but should work with any bash environment with sed available. If you want to use aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env as well, you need jq.

1. Clone the repo
2. Add aws-profile and|or aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env to $PATH as preferred in your environment (I just simply add whole clone to path)

Usage

aws-profile

Just execute aws-profile with profile named in ~/.aws/config and start running those commands.

$ aws-profile
Pass profile name as an argument. Mayhaps one of these?

test
foo
$ aws-profile test
AWS [test]: ~ $

Exit with exit or ctrl+d.

aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env

When you have a session initiated with aws-profile, you can execute aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env which opens yet another subshell with temporary credentials in environment.

$ aws-profile test
AWS [test]: ~ $ aws-sts-temporary-creds-to-env
AWS [test*]: ~ env | grep AWS_
AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=FQoDY...
AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE=test
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=fwf....
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AS...

See the little star in bash prompt? That means you do have temporary credentials in your shell.

Now you can execute directly simple nodejs program like this without any hassle.

const AWS = require("aws-sdk");

const s3 = new AWS.S3({
    apiVersion: '2006-03-01',
    params: {Bucket: 'mybucket'}
});
s3.upload({
    Metadata: {
        "mimeType": 'text/plain'
    },
    ContentType: 'text/plain',
    StorageClass: "REDUCED_REDUNDANCY",
    Key: 'test',
    Body: 'test data'
  });

When you are done with temporary credentials, just toss them away with exit or ctrl+d. Note that by default, sts temporary credentials are valid for an hour.