AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE as a configuration source

[Bekt]

The configuration files are not always located at ~/.aws. How should one go about specifying the credentials file or path?

[SamCyanide]

They should be... on windows you can download the 'awscli' package from pip, and type aws configure to setup your credentials. Or you can set up environment variables on both systems.

[Bekt]

Huh? There are a lot of cases when the credentials file should be in a system-wide location. For example, cron jobs, nobody user scripts, etc.

[Bekt]

Additionally, AWS CLI supports AWS_CONFIG_FILE.

[rayluo]

@Bekt May I ask your use case?

Besides the environment variable AWS_CONFIG_FILE which you mentioned, I have just tried launching an aws command in my crontab, it can still access my ~/.aws settings and works properly.

The nobody user scripts case won't work indeed, but that is caused by there is typically no aws relevant packages installed for user "nobody".

[Bekt]

@rayluo: I wrote a very-small post here: http://bekt.github.io/p/docker-aws-credentials/

Hope that explains.

Edit: I don't think boto3 supports AWS_CONFIG_FILE either?

[jamesls]

This is being tracked here: boto/botocore#600

The one hiccup is that we can't use AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE, because boto3 uses that for a legacy config file format. We'd probably have to name it AWS_SHARED_CREDENTIAL_FILE or something similar.

[Bekt]

👍

[jamesls]

Pull request is being reviewed at boto/botocore#623. This will be available in boto3 as soon as the linked PR is merged. Closing out issue as the only remaining work is in the boto/botocore repo.