Passing in access and secret keys through AWS CLI

Question

Due to certain enterprise limitations, I'm only able to access AWS through the command line, and I cannot set environment variables. I was wondering if there is any way to pass in my keys with the command in a manner like this:

aws s3 cp <file> s3://testbucket --aws-access-key <accesskey> --aws-secret-key <secretkey>

I noticed that this question is fairly similar, although it seems that the answers are either not applicable to my situation or referencing the ec2din command, which I could not translate into copying files to s3. I just get the response Unknown options: --aws-access-key,--aws-secret-key.

Answer 1

Try this:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AAAA AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=BBB aws s3 cp <file> s3://testbucket

This will set the keys for this command only. If you need the keys for the session, export them like below:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AAAA ; export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=BBB ; aws s3 cp <file> s3://testbucket

Answer 2

Are you allowed to save the AK/SK to a file? (very much like an SSH private key would be saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa for example)

If so, you can run the command aws configure, which will prompt for your AK and SK (plus default region and default output format). The credentials will be saved to ~/.aws/credentials, and the region and output (if you chose to specify them) will be saved to ~/.aws/config.

If you are not allowed to write your credentials to a file, be careful with commands passing credentials through the command like - those credentials might get into a "command history" file! In some shells, you can configure so that adding a space in front of a command will prevent it from being written into the history file.