Tutorial: Use IAM Identity Center to run Amazon S3 commands - Amazon Command Line Interface
Step 1: Authentication in IAM Identity CenterStep 2: Gather your IAM Identity Center informationStep 3: Create Amazon S3 bucketsStep 4: Install the Amazon CLIStep 6: Configure your Amazon CLI profileStep 7: Log in to IAM Identity CenterStep 8: Run Amazon S3 commands Step 9: Log out of IAM Identity CenterStep 10: Clean up resourcesTroubleshootingAdditional resources
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Tutorial: Use IAM Identity Center to run Amazon S3 commands

This topic describes how to configure the Amazon CLI to authenticate users with current Amazon IAM Identity Center (IAM Identity Center) to retrieve credentials to run Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI) commands for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Step 1: Authentication in IAM Identity Center

Gain access to SSO authentication within IAM Identity Center. Choose one of the following methods to access your Amazon credentials.

Follow the instructions in Getting started in the Amazon IAM Identity Center User Guide. This process activates IAM Identity Center, creates an administrative user, and adds an appropriate least-privilege permission set.

Note

Create a permission set that applies least-privilege permissions. We recommend using the predefined PowerUserAccess permission set, unless your employer has created a custom permission set for this purpose.

Exit the portal and sign in again to see your Amazon Web Services accounts, programmatic access details, and options for Administrator or PowerUserAccess. Select PowerUserAccess when working with the SDK.

Sign in to Amazon through your identity provider’s portal. If your Cloud Administrator has granted you PowerUserAccess (developer) permissions, you see the Amazon Web Services accounts that you have access to and your permission set. Next to the name of your permission set, you see options to access the accounts manually or programmatically using that permission set.

Custom implementations might result in different experiences, such as different permission set names. If you're not sure which permission set to use, contact your IT team for help.

Sign in to Amazon through your Amazon access portal. If your Cloud Administrator has granted you PowerUserAccess (developer) permissions, you see the Amazon Web Services accounts that you have access to and your permission set. Next to the name of your permission set, you see options to access the accounts manually or programmatically using that permission set.

Contact your IT team for help.

Step 2: Gather your IAM Identity Center information

After gaining access to Amazon, gather your IAM Identity Center information by performing the following:

  1. In your Amazon access portal, select the permission set you use for development, and select the Access keys link.

  2. In the Get credentials dialog box, choose the tab that matches your operating system.

  3. Choose the IAM Identity Center credentials method to get the SSO Start URL and SSO Region values that you need to run aws configure sso. For information on which scopes value to register, see OAuth 2.0 Access scopes in the IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Step 3: Create Amazon S3 buckets

Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon S3 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/s3/.

For this tutorial, create a few buckets to be later retrieved in a list.

Step 4: Install the Amazon CLI

Install the Amazon CLI following the instructions for your operating system. For more information, see Install or update to the latest version of the Amazon CLI.

Once installed, you can verify the installation by opening your preferred terminal and running the following command. This should display your installed version of the Amazon CLI. 

$ aws --version

Step 6: Configure your Amazon CLI profile

Configure your profile using one of the following methods

The sso-session section of the config file is used to group configuration variables for acquiring SSO access tokens, which can then be used to acquire Amazon credentials. The following settings are used:

You define an sso-session section and associate it to a profile. The sso_region and sso_start_url settings must be set within the sso-session section. Typically, sso_account_id and sso_role_name must be set in the profile section so that the SDK can request SSO credentials.

The following example configures the SDK to request SSO credentials and supports automated token refresh: 

[profile dev]
sso_session = my-sso
sso_account_id = 111122223333
sso_role_name = SampleRole

[sso-session my-sso]
sso_region = us-east-1
sso_start_url = https://my-sso-portal.awsapps.com/start

The sso-session section of the config file is used to group configuration variables for acquiring SSO access tokens, which can then be used to acquire Amazon credentials. The following settings are used:

You define an sso-session section and associate it to a profile. sso_region and sso_start_url must be set within the sso-session section. Typically, sso_account_id and sso_role_name must be set in the profile section so that the SDK can request SSO credentials.

The following example configures the SDK to request SSO credentials and supports automated token refresh: 

[profile my-dev-profile]
sso_session = my-sso
sso_account_id = 111122223333
sso_role_name = SampleRole

[sso-session my-sso]
sso_region = us-east-1
sso_start_url = https://my-sso-portal.awsapps.com/start
sso_registration_scopes = sso:account:access

The authentication token is cached to disk under the ~/.aws/sso/cache directory with a filename based on the session name.

Step 7: Log in to IAM Identity Center

Note

The sign in process may prompt you to allow the Amazon CLI access to your data. Since the Amazon CLI is built on top of the SDK for Python, permission messages may contain variations of the botocore name.

To retrieve and cache your IAM Identity Center credentials, run the following command for the Amazon CLI to open your default browser and verify your IAM Identity Center log in.

$ aws sso login --profile my-dev-profile

Step 8: Run Amazon S3 commands

To list the buckets you created earlier, use the aws s3 ls command. The following example lists all of your Amazon S3 buckets.

$ aws s3 ls
2018-12-11 17:08:50 my-bucket
2018-12-14 14:55:44 my-bucket2

Step 9: Log out of IAM Identity Center

When you are done using your IAM Identity Center profile, run the following command to delete your cached credentials.

$ aws sso logout
Successfully signed out of all SSO profiles.

Step 10: Clean up resources

After you're done with this tutorial, clean up any resources you created during this tutorial that you no longer need, including Amazon S3 buckets.

Troubleshooting

If you come across issues using the Amazon CLI, see Troubleshoot Amazon CLI errors for common troubleshooting steps.

Additional resources

Additional resources are as follows.