terraform/website/source/docs/providers/aws/index.html.markdown

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
aws	Provider: AWS	docs-aws-index	The Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider is used to interact with the many resources supported by AWS. The provider needs to be configured with the proper credentials before it can be used.

AWS Provider

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider is used to interact with the many resources supported by AWS. The provider needs to be configured with the proper credentials before it can be used.

Use the navigation to the left to read about the available resources.

Example Usage

# Configure the AWS Provider
provider "aws" {
    access_key = "${var.aws_access_key}"
    secret_key = "${var.aws_secret_key}"
    region = "us-east-1"
}

# Create a web server
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
    ...
}

Authentication

The AWS provider offers flexible means of providing credentials for authentication. Included is support including hard coded credentials, environment variables, and shared credential files, in that order of precedence.

Terraform will first attempt to use an access_key and secret_key provided in the provider block (shown in the example above). If those are omitted, it will attempt to discover those values by referencing the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables. Lastly, if those are not found it will look for credentials in the default location for a credentials file, or the file path specified in the shared_credentials_file attribute of the provider block.

See the argument reference below for information on which attributes to specify to use a corresponding credential provider.

Argument Reference

The following arguments are supported in the provider block:

• access_key - (Optional) This is the AWS access key. It must be provided, but it can also be sourced from the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID environment variable, or via a shared credentials file if profile is specified.

• secret_key - (Optional) This is the AWS secret key. It must be provided, but it can also be sourced from the AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variable, or via a shared credentials file if profile is specified.

• region - (Required) This is the AWS region. It must be provided, but it can also be sourced from the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variables, or via a shared credentials file if profile is specified.

• profile - (Optional) This is the AWS profile name as set in the shared credentials file.

• shared_credentials_file = (Optional) This is the path to the shared credentials file. If this is not set and a profile is specified, ~/.aws/credentials will be used.

• token - (Optional) Use this to set an MFA token. It can also be sourced from the AWS_SECURITY_TOKEN environment variable.

• max_retries - (Optional) This is the maximum number of times an API call is being retried in case requests are being throttled or experience transient failures. The delay between the subsequent API calls increases exponentially.

• allowed_account_ids - (Optional) List of allowed AWS account IDs (whitelist) to prevent you mistakenly using a wrong one (and end up destroying live environment). Conflicts with forbidden_account_ids.

• forbidden_account_ids - (Optional) List of forbidden AWS account IDs (blacklist) to prevent you mistakenly using a wrong one (and end up destroying live environment). Conflicts with allowed_account_ids.

• dynamodb_endpoint - (Optional) Use this to override the default endpoint URL constructed from the region. It's typically used to connect to dynamodb-local.

• kinesis_endpoint - (Optional) Use this to override the default endpoint URL constructed from the region. It's typically used to connect to kinesalite.