How to switch between multiple accounts with AWS SDK

Question

Im currently using the credential file (~/.aws/credentials) to initialize the SDK.

Credential File format.

aws_access_key_id={YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID}
aws_secret_access_key={YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY}

My requirement is to switch between multiple aws accounts. I'm currently trying to resolve this by overwriting the file with new credentials and re initialize the sdk. Is there any other efficient workaround to resolve this ? Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

You can define multiple profiles in ~/.aws/credentials and refer to the profile in your SDK initialization. See: A New and Standardized Way to Manage Credentials in the AWS SDKs which also shows examples for each language.

[default]
aws_access_key_id = ACCESS_KEY
aws_secret_access_key = SECRET_KEY
aws_session_token = TOKEN
[Alice]
aws_access_key_id = Alice_access_key_ID
aws_secret_access_key = Alice_secret_access_key
[Bob]
aws_access_key_id = Bob_access_key_ID
aws_secret_access_key = Bob_secret_access_key