Loading credentials JSON with AWS SDK Results in Error

Question

I'm trying to load credentials for AWS with loadFromPath and getting an unexpected error. Hardcoding the same credentials with AWS.config.update works fine. To make sure the path and format of credentials file is correct I loaded the same with fs.readFile and it loads correctly, so there don't seem to be any path / permissions issues. This seems super basic but I've been pulling my hair out trying to resolve. Thanks for your help.

The error / output:

    Here: /home/ec2-user/.ec2/credentials.json
    Got this through readFile: { access_id: 'XXXXXXX',
    private_key: 'XXXXXXX',
    keypair: 'praneethkey',
    'key-pair-file': '/home/ec2-user/.ec2/praneethkey.pem',
    region: 'us-west-2' }

    /home/ec2-user/node_modules/aws-sdk/lib/config.js:221
    if (err) throw err;
                   ^
  SyntaxError: Unexpected token <
    at Object.parse (native)
    at /home/ec2-user/node_modules/aws-sdk/lib/metadata_service.js:100:38
    at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (/home/ec2-user/node_modules/aws-sdk/lib/metadata_service.js:75:43)
    at IncomingMessage.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:117:20)
    at _stream_readable.js:910:16
    at process._tickCallback (node.js:415:13)

The code:

'use strict';

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
var fs = require('fs');

var pathv = process.env.HOME + '/.ec2/credentials.json';

AWS.config.loadFromPath(pathv);

console.log('Here: ' + pathv);


fs.readFile(pathv, 'utf8', function (err, data) {
  if (err) {
    console.log('Error: ' + err);
    return;
  }
  data = JSON.parse(data);

console.log("Got this through readFile:",data);

Answer 1

You can skip the credential configuration, if you have the env vars
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
The AWS SDK will read those vars by default

If you still want to go with loading credentials from file, check that credentials.json has valid JSON.

Regarding http://aws.amazon.com/sdkfornodejs/ should be something like

{ "accessKeyId": "akid", "secretAccessKey": "secret", "region": "us-west-2" }

Seems like you have access_id where it should be "accessKeyId" and private_key where it should be "secretAccessKey"

Answer 2

Found the answer to this. For some bizarre reason, Amazon uses different field names for credentials in Node vs. other frameworks (e.g. Ruby).

In Ruby, just the two first items are:

"access_id": "[Your AWS Access Key ID]",
"private_key": "[Your AWS Secret Access Key]",

While in Node.js, these same items are:

"accessKeyId": "[Your AWS Access Key ID]",
"secretAccessKey": "[Your AWS Secret Access Key]",

Changed the names in the credentials JSON to the latter and the error is gone. Why couldn't it be the same?