passing access and secret key aws cli

Question

I am trying to embed access and secret key along with aws cli. e.g.

aws ec2 describe-instances --aws-access-key <access_key> --aws-secret-key <secret_key>

Also tried with -o and -w options for access and secret key respectively. It says: Unknown option aws-access-key and aws-secret-key

Answer 1

You can pass the credentials by configuring the AWS CLI or by setting your environment variables so your CLI just reads the key from the variable.

Configuring the AWS CLI:

aws configure

AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

Default region name [None]: us-west-2

Default output format [None]: json

Setting Environment variables in Linux, macOS or Unix:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-2

Setting Environment variables in Windows

setx AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE

setx AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

setx AWS_DEFAULT_REGION us-west-2

You can check out this official documentation also, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-configure.html