aws-mfa-env

• Author: Adam Bolte
• Contact: [email protected]

This is a small Bash script that gives the user the ability to quickly obtain AWS session credentials as shell environment variables, using heavily restricted IAM access keys and a MFA device.

For example, a user might have a policy applied to deny nearly any service access until the user has enabled MFA, as described by Amazon here.

Project page

https://github.com/sitepoint/aws-mfa-env

Requirements

• AWS Command Line Interface version 2
• GNU Bash
• GNU grep
• jq

These are the dependencies that were tested, and all with the possible exception of the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) should be available in almost any desktop or server GNU/Linux distribution's package management system.

Setup

Place the aws-mfa-env script somewhere in your path. It need not have executable permissions set. Next, in your login shell (eg. ~/.bashrc for GNU Bash, ~/.zshrc for Z shell) file add the following line:

. aws-mfa-env

Usage

Ensure AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables are set. Additionally, set AWS_MFA_ARN to the ARN of your IAM account's MFA device. It will take this format:

arn:aws:iam::<AWS ACCOUNT>:mfa/<IAM USER>

Once those have been taken care of, simply run the aws-mfa-env command.

$ aws-mfa-env
MFA token: 123456
Success!
Expiration: "2024-07-25T19:13:43+00:00"
$

This will set new values for the environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and also export a new environment variable AWS_SESSION_TOKEN. With these in place, you can now execute other commands from the AWS Command Line Interface (aka. aws-cli) or scripts that use libraries provided by AWS (such as Python scripts that use boto3), provided you have the appropriate permissions to do so.

At no point does aws-mfa-env write the session credentials to a file.

Issues

If you encounter any bugs or would like to propose a new feature, feel free to open an issue on GitHub, however please be patent with a response.

Likewise, pull requests are also welcome.

Related

If you like this project, you might also find envswitch useful. These are both stand-alone tools but work very well together.