Unable to locate credentials - Gitlab Pipeline for S3

Question

I'm deploying the front-end of my website to amazon s3 via Gitlab pipelines. My previous deployments have worked successfully but the most recent deployments do not. Here's the error:

Completed 12.3 MiB/20.2 MiB (0 Bytes/s) with 1 file(s) remaining
upload failed: dist/vendor.bundle.js.map to s3://<my-s3-bucket-name>/vendor.bundle.js.map Unable to locate credentials

Under my secret variables I have defined four. They are S3 credential variables (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID & AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY) for two different buckets. One pair is for the testing branch and the other is for the production branch.

Not - the production environment variables are protected and the other variables are not. Here's the deploy script that I run:

#/bin/bash
#upload files
aws s3 cp ./dist s3://my-url-$1 --recursive --acl public-read

So why am I getting this credential location error? Surely it should just pick up the environment variables automatically (the unprotected ones) and deploy them. Do I need to define the variables in the job and refer to them?

Answer 1

(I encountered this issue many times - Adding another answer for people that have the same error - from other reasons).

A quick checklist.

Go to Setting -> CI/CD -> Variables and check:

1. If both AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID & AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables exist.
2. If both names are spelled right.
3. If their state is defined as protected - they can only be ran against protected branches (like master).

If error still occurs:

1. Make sure the access keys still exist and active on your account.
2. Delete current environment variables and replace them with new generated access keys and make sure AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY doesn't contain any special characters (can lead to strange errors).