Configuring AWS CLI

Configuring AWS CLI

In this article we will see how to configure AWS CLI, by that I mean we configure basic settings/credentials that the AWS CLI will use to interact with AWS.

The easiest and fastest way to configure AWS CLI is to use the following command

aws configure

Once you run this command you will be prompted to enter the following 4 items

  • Access Key ID
  • Secret Access Key
  • AWS Region
  • Output format

It will look like the following

Screenshot from 2021-01-14 00-47-11.png

AWS CLI will store this information in a profile (a profile is collection of settings) named default in the credentials file. By default, AWS CLI will use the information in this profile when you run an AWS CLI command that doesn't explicitly specify which profile to use.

Note - You can rerun aws configure to overwrite the existing values

Access Key ID and Secret Access key

Access keys consist of an Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, they are just like your username and password, which are used to sign programmatic requests that you make to AWS. If you don't already have access keys, you can easily create them from the AWS Management Console. You can go through the article
How to create AWS Access Keys to understand how to create access keys.

Region

We must specify an AWS Region when using the AWS CLI, either explicitly or by setting a default Region.

The Default region name is the AWS Region whose servers you want to send your requests to by default. For example, you can type us-west-2 to use US West (Oregon). This is the Region that all later requests are sent to, unless you specify otherwise in an individual command.

Output format

The Default output format specifies how the results are formatted. If not specified, json is used as the default. Apart from json format yaml, yaml-stream, text, table formats are also supported.

Verify

Just to confirm it all worked, let's list all the ec2 instances using the following command

aws ec2 describe-instances