AWS CLI Account Management

01 Apr 2022

I recently needed to manage multiple AWS accounts from the same machine. AWS CLI supports this using Profiles. AWS account profiles are configured in ~/.aws/credentials. For example:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
aws_secret_access_key=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
region=us-east-1
output=json

[account_1]
aws_access_key_id=AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE
aws_secret_access_key=je7MtGbClwBF/2Zp9Utk/h3yCo8nvbEXAMPLEKEY
region=us-east-2
output=json

AWS CLI defaults to using the default account for commands run without specifying a profile.

AWS CLI accepts a —profile profile_name option to specify the account to run that command against:

$ aws —profile account_1 s3 ls

AWS CLI will also check the value of the AWS_PROFILE environment variable to determine which account credentials to use. This can be set with:

$ export AWS_PROFILE="account_1"

I wrote this bash function to switch between accounts:

aws-profile() { export AWS_PROFILE="$1"; }

To use the function: Add the above line to your ~/.bashrc, reload your shell, and run:

$ aws-profile account_a

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