aws-vault is a command-line tool designed to securely store and access AWS credentials in development environments. It provides a convenient and secure way to manage AWS access keys, making it easier to work with AWS services and resources while maintaining a higher level of security.
Here’s an overview of the aws-vault tool and its functionality:
- Secure Credential Storage: aws-vault allows you to securely store your AWS access keys, which are used to authenticate and authorize your access to AWS resources. It uses your operating system’s native keychain or password manager to encrypt and store the credentials, ensuring their protection.
- Single Sign-On (SSO) Integration: aws-vault integrates with various SSO providers, such as Okta, Azure Active Directory, or AWS SSO. This allows you to leverage your existing SSO setup to authenticate and retrieve temporary AWS credentials, reducing the need to manage and rotate access keys manually.
- Temporary Credential Generation: With aws-vault, you can generate short-lived, temporary AWS credentials called session tokens. These tokens have a limited lifespan and can be automatically refreshed, reducing the risk of long-lived access keys being compromised.
- Automatic Credential Injection: aws-vault seamlessly integrates with other command-line tools and SDKs by automatically injecting the temporary credentials into the environment. This eliminates the need to manually set environment variables or modify AWS configuration files when switching between different AWS profiles or roles.
- Multiple AWS Profiles and Roles: aws-vault supports the management of multiple AWS profiles and roles. You can create different profiles to represent different AWS accounts or environments, and switch between them easily using the aws-vault command.
- Access Control and Authorization: aws-vault leverages AWS IAM roles and policies to control access to AWS resources. You can define fine-grained IAM policies to restrict the permissions of the temporary credentials generated by aws-vault, ensuring least privilege access.
- Cross-Platform Support: aws-vault is designed to work across different operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides a consistent experience and functionality regardless of the platform you are using.
By using aws-vault, you can store your AWS credentials securely and retrieve temporary session tokens without exposing your long-lived access keys. This helps to protect your AWS resources and reduce the risk of credentials being compromised.
aws-vault Command Examples
1. Add credentials to the secure keystore:
# aws-vault add profile
2. Execute a command with AWS credentials in the environment:
# aws-vault exec profile -- "aws s3 ls"
3. Open a browser window and login to the AWS Console:
# aws-vault login profile
4. List profiles, along with their credentials and sessions:
# aws-vault list
5. Rotate AWS credentials:
# aws-vault rotate profile
6. Remove credentials from the secure keystore:
# aws-vault remove profile