Configure your AWS credentials and region environment variables for use in other GitHub Actions. This action implements the AWS SDK credential resolution chain and exports environment variables for your other Actions to use. Environment variable exports are detected by both the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI for AWS API calls.
We have added a warning when using long-term credentials to access AWS (IAM access keys and secret keys). Using long-term credentials requires you to create IAM users and properly secure the access keys to prevent their disclosure. A better approach is to use GitHub's support for OpenID Connect to authenticate using an IAM role to generate temporary security credentials.
We have just released v4
of Configure AWS Credentials. The only thing that
changed from v3
is that the action now runs on node20
instead of node16
.
You can still see the v3
announcement below, as it is still recent.
We have recently released v3
of Configure AWS Credentials! With this new
release we have migrated the code to TypeScript, and have also migrated away
from using v2
of the JavaScript AWS SDK. This should eliminate the warning you
have seen in your workflow logs about v2
deprecation.
In addition to the refactored codebase, we have also introduced some changes to existing functionality, added some new features, and fixed some bugs. These changes should be backwards compatible with your existing workflows.
Notable changes to existing functionality
- By default, the assumed role credentials will only be valid for one hour in
all use cases. This is changed from 6 hours in
v2
. You can adjust this value with therole-duration-seconds
input. - By default, your account ID will not be masked in workflow logs. This was
changed from being masked by default in the previous version. AWS does not consider
account IDs as sensitive information, so this change reflects that stance. You
can revert to the old default and mask your account ID in workflow logs by
setting the
mask-aws-account-id
input totrue
.
New features
- You can now configure retry settings in case your STS call fails. By default,
we retry with exponential backoff twelve times. You can disable this behavior
altogether by setting the
disable-retry
input totrue
, or you can configure the number of times the action will retry with theretry-max-attempts
input. - You can now set the returned credentials as action step outputs. To do this,
you can set the
output-credentials
prop totrue
. - There's now an option to clear the AWS-related environment variables at the
start of the action. Clearing these variables is often a workaround for
problems, so enabling this can be helpful if existing credentials or environment
variables are interfering with the action. You can enable this by setting the
unset-current-credentials
input totrue
.
Bug fixes
You can find a list of bugs that have been fixed in v3 in the changelog.
- Overview
- Security recommendations
- Using this action
- OIDC
- Self-Hosted Runners
- Examples
- License Summary
- Security Disclosures
We support five methods for fetching credentials from AWS, but we recommend that you use GitHub's OIDC provider in conjunction with a configured AWS IAM Identity Provider endpoint.
To do that, you would add the following step to your workflow:
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
aws-region: us-east-2
This will cause the action to perform an AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
call and
return temporary security credentials for use by other steps in your workflow. In order for
this to work, you'll need to preconfigure the IAM Identity Provider in your AWS account
(see Assuming a Role for details).
You can use this action with the AWS CLI available in GitHub's hosted virtual environments or run this action multiple times to use different AWS accounts, regions, or IAM roles in the same GitHub Actions workflow. As an example, here is a complete workflow file that uploads artifacts to Amazon S3.
jobs:
deploy:
name: Upload to Amazon S3
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
# These permissions are needed to interact with GitHub's OIDC Token endpoint.
permissions:
id-token: write
contents: read
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Configure AWS credentials from Test account
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/my-github-actions-role-test
aws-region: us-east-1
- name: Copy files to the test website with the AWS CLI
run: |
aws s3 sync . s3://my-s3-test-website-bucket
- name: Configure AWS credentials from Production account
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::222222222222:role/my-github-actions-role-prod
aws-region: us-west-2
- name: Copy files to the production website with the AWS CLI
run: |
aws s3 sync . s3://my-s3-prod-website-bucket
See action.yml for the full documentation for this action's inputs and outputs.
Some of this documentation may be inaccurate if you are using GHES (GitHub Enterprise Servers), please take note to review the GitHub documentation when relevant.
For example, the URL that the OIDC JWT is issued from is different than the usual tokens.actions.githubusercontent.com
, and will be unique to your enterprise server. As a result, you will need to configure this differently when you create the Identity Provider.
We recommend following Amazon IAM best practices for the AWS credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows, including:
- Do not store credentials in your repository's code.
- Grant least privilege to the credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows. Grant only the permissions required to perform the actions in your GitHub Actions workflows.
- Monitor the activity of the credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows.
There are five different supported ways to retrieve credentials:
- Using GitHub's OIDC provider (
AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
) - Proceeding as an IAM user (No STS call is made)
- Using access keys as action input (
AssumeRole
) - Using a WebIdentity Token File (
AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
) - Using existing credentials in your runner (
AssumeRole
)
We recommend using GitHub's OIDC provider to get short-lived AWS credentials needed for your actions. See OIDC for more information on how to setup your AWS account to assume a role with OIDC.
The following table describes which method is used based on which values are supplied to the Action:
Identity Used | aws-access-key-id |
role-to-assume |
web-identity-token-file |
role-chaining |
id-token permission |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
[✅ Recommended] Assume Role directly using GitHub OIDC provider | ✔ | ✔ | |||
IAM User | ✔ | ||||
Assume Role using IAM User credentials | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Assume Role using WebIdentity Token File credentials | ✔ | ✔ | |||
Assume Role using existing credentials | ✔ | ✔ |
*Note: role-chaining
is not necessary to use existing credentials in every use case. If you're getting a "Credentials loaded by the SDK do not match" error, try enabling this prop.
The default session duration is 1 hour.
If you would like to adjust this you can pass a duration to role-duration-seconds
, but the duration cannot exceed the maximum that was defined when the IAM Role was created.
If your role requires an external ID to assume, you can provide the external ID with the role-external-id
input
The default session name is "GitHubActions", and you can modify it by specifying the desired name in role-session-name
.
The session will be tagged with the following tags: (GITHUB_
environment variable definitions can be
found here)
Key | Value |
---|---|
GitHub | "Actions" |
Repository | GITHUB_REPOSITORY |
Workflow | GITHUB_WORKFLOW |
Action | GITHUB_ACTION |
Actor | GITHUB_ACTOR |
Branch | GITHUB_REF |
Commit | GITHUB_SHA |
Note: all tag values must conform to
the requirements.
Particularly, GITHUB_WORKFLOW
will be truncated if it's too long. If
GITHUB_ACTOR
or GITHUB_WORKFLOW
contain invalid characters, the characters
will be replaced with an '*'.
The action will use session tagging by default during role assumption, unless you are assuming a role with a WebIdentity. For WebIdentity role assumption, the session tags have to be included in the encoded WebIdentity token. This means that Tags can only be supplied by the OIDC provider, and they cannot set during the AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity API call within the Action. See issue 419 for more info
You can skip this session tagging by providing
role-skip-session-tagging
as true in the action's inputs:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
role-skip-session-tagging: true
An IAM policy in stringified JSON format that you want to use as an inline session policy. Depending on preferences, the JSON could be written on a single line like this:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
inline-session-policy: '{"Version":"2012-10-17","Statement":[{"Sid":"Stmt1","Effect":"Allow","Action":"s3:List*","Resource":"*"}]}'
Or we can have a nicely formatted JSON as well:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
inline-session-policy: >-
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid":"Stmt1",
"Effect":"Allow",
"Action":"s3:List*",
"Resource":"*"
}
]
}
The Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) of the IAM managed policies that you want to use as managed session policies. The policies must exist in the same account as the role. You can pass a single managed policy like this:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
managed-session-policies: arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess
And we can pass multiple managed policies likes this:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
managed-session-policies: |
arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess
arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3OutpostsReadOnlyAccess
You can now configure retry settings for when the STS call fails. By default, we retry with exponential backoff 12
times. You can disable this behavior altogether by setting the disable-retry
input to true
, or you can configure the number of times it retries with the retry-max-attempts
input.
Your account ID is not masked by default in workflow logs since it's not considered sensitive information. However, you can set the mask-aws-account-id
input to true
to mask your account ID in workflow logs if desired.
Sometimes, existing credentials in your runner can get in the way of the intended outcome, and the recommended solution is to include another step in your workflow which unsets the environment variables set by this action. Now if you set the unset-current-credentials
input to true
, the workaround is made eaiser
Some edge cases are unable to properly parse an AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
if it
contains special characters. For more information, please see the
AWS CLI documentation.
If you set the special-characters-workaround
option, this action will
continually retry fetching credentials until we get one that does not have
special characters. This option overrides the disable-retry
and
retry-max-attempts
options.
We recommend using GitHub's OIDC provider to get short-lived AWS credentials needed for your actions. When using OIDC, this action will create a JWT unique to the workflow run, and it will use this JWT to assume the role. For this action to create the JWT, it is required for your workflow to have the id-token: write
permission:
permissions:
id-token: write
contents: read
When the JWT is created, an audience needs to be specified. By default, the audience is sts.amazonaws.com
and this will work for most cases. Changing the default audience may be necessary when using non-default AWS partitions. You can specify the audience through the audience
input:
- name: Configure AWS Credentials for China region audience
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
audience: sts.amazonaws.com.cn
aws-region: us-east-3
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
To use GitHub's OIDC provider, you must first set up federation with the provider in as an IAM IdP. The GitHub OIDC provider only needs to be created once per account (i.e. multiple IAM Roles that can be assumed by the GitHub's OIDC can share a single OIDC Provider).
Note that the thumbprint has been set to all F's because the thumbprint is not
used when authenticating tokens.actions.githubusercontent.com
. Instead, IAM
uses its library of trusted CAs to authenticate. However, this value is still
required by the API.
This CloudFormation template will configure the IdP for you. You can copy the template below, or load it from here: https://d38mtn6aq9zhn6.cloudfront.net/configure-aws-credentials-latest.yml
Parameters:
GitHubOrg:
Description: Name of GitHub organization/user (case sensitive)
Type: String
RepositoryName:
Description: Name of GitHub repository (case sensitive)
Type: String
OIDCProviderArn:
Description: Arn for the GitHub OIDC Provider.
Default: ""
Type: String
OIDCAudience:
Description: Audience supplied to configure-aws-credentials.
Default: "sts.amazonaws.com"
Type: String
Conditions:
CreateOIDCProvider: !Equals
- !Ref OIDCProviderArn
- ""
Resources:
Role:
Type: AWS::IAM::Role
Properties:
AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
Statement:
- Effect: Allow
Action: sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
Principal:
Federated: !If
- CreateOIDCProvider
- !Ref GithubOidc
- !Ref OIDCProviderArn
Condition:
StringEquals:
token.actions.githubusercontent.com:aud: !Ref OIDCAudience
StringLike:
token.actions.githubusercontent.com:sub: !Sub repo:${GitHubOrg}/${RepositoryName}:*
GithubOidc:
Type: AWS::IAM::OIDCProvider
Condition: CreateOIDCProvider
Properties:
Url: https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com
ClientIdList:
- sts.amazonaws.com
ThumbprintList:
- ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
Outputs:
Role:
Value: !GetAtt Role.Arn
To align with the Amazon IAM best practice of granting least privilege, the assume role policy document should contain a Condition
that specifies a subject (sub
) allowed to assume the role. GitHub also recommends filtering for the correct audience (aud
). See AWS IAM documentation on which claims you can filter for in your trust policies.
Without a subject (sub
) condition, any GitHub user or repository could potentially assume the role. The subject can be scoped to a GitHub organization and repository as shown in the CloudFormation template. However, scoping it down to your org and repo may cause the role assumption to fail in some cases. See Example subject claims for specific details on what the subject value will be depending on your workflow. You can also customize your subject claim if you want full control over the information you can filter for in your trust policy. If you aren't sure what your subject (sub
) key is, you can add the actions-oidc-debugger
action to your workflow to see the value of the subject (sub
) key, as well as other claims.
Additional claim conditions can be added for higher specificity as explained in the GitHub documentation. Due to implementation details, not every OIDC claim is presently supported by IAM.
For further information on OIDC and GitHub Actions, please see:
- AWS docs: Creating OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity providers
- AWS docs: IAM JSON policy elements: Condition
- GitHub docs: About security hardening with OpenID Connect
- GitHub docs: Configuring OpenID Connect in Amazon Web Services
- GitHub changelog: GitHub Actions: Secure cloud deployments with OpenID Connect
If you run your GitHub Actions in a self-hosted runner that already has access to AWS credentials, such as an EC2 instance, then you do not need to provide IAM user access key credentials to this action. We will use the standard AWS JavaScript SDK credential resolution methods to find your credentials, so if the AWS JS SDK can authenticate on your runner, this Action will as well.
If no access key credentials are given in the action inputs, this action will use credentials from the runner environment using the default methods for the AWS SDK for Javascript.
You can use this action to simply configure the region and account ID in the environment, and then use the runner's credentials for all AWS API calls made by your Actions workflow:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
In this case, your runner's credentials must have permissions to call any AWS APIs called by your Actions workflow.
Or, you can use this action to assume a role, and then use the role credentials for all AWS API calls made by your Actions workflow:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role
In this case, your runner's credentials must have permissions to assume the role.
You can also assume a role using a web identity token file, such as if using Amazon EKS IRSA. Pods running in EKS worker nodes that do not run as root can use this file to assume a role with a web identity.
If you run in self-hosted environments and in secured environment where you need use a specific proxy you can set it in the action manually.
Additionally this action will always consider already configured proxy in the environment.
Manually configured proxy:
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role
http-proxy: "http://companydomain.com:3128"
Proxy configured in the environment variable:
# Your environment configuration
HTTP_PROXY="http://companydomain.com:3128"
The action will read the underlying proxy configuration from the environment and you don't need to configure it in the action.
This workflow does not install the AWS CLI
into your environment. Self-hosted runners that intend to run this action prior
to executing aws
commands need to have the AWS CLI
installed
if it's not already present.
Most GitHub hosted runner environments
should include the AWS CLI by default.
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
role-session-name: MySessionName
In this example, the Action will load the OIDC token from the GitHub-provided environment variable and use it to assume the role arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
with the session name MySessionName
.
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
role-session-name: MySessionName
- name: Configure other AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::987654321000:role/my-second-role
role-session-name: MySessionName
role-chaining: true
In this two-step example, the first step will use OIDC to assume the role arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
just as in the prior example. Following that, a second step will use this role to assume a different role, arn:aws:iam::987654321000:role/my-second-role
.
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_TO_ASSUME }}
role-external-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_EXTERNAL_ID }}
role-duration-seconds: 1200
role-session-name: MySessionName
In this example, the secret AWS_ROLE_TO_ASSUME
contains a string like arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
. To assume a role in the same account as the static credentials, you can simply specify the role name, like role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role
.
- name: Configure AWS Credentials 1
id: creds
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
output-credentials: true
- name: get caller identity 1
run: |
aws sts get-caller-identity
- name: Configure AWS Credentials 2
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
aws-region: us-east-2
aws-access-key-id: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-access-key-id }}
aws-secret-access-key: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-secret-access-key }}
aws-session-token: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-session-token }}
role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-other-github-actions-role
- name: get caller identity2
run: |
aws sts get-caller-identity
This example shows that you can reference the fetched credentials as outputs if output-credentials
is set to true. This example also shows that you can use the aws-session-token
input in a situation where session tokens are fetched and passed to this action.
This code is made available under the MIT license.
If you would like to report a potential security issue in this project, please do not create a GitHub issue. Instead, please follow the instructions here or email AWS security directly.