switch-profile

Switch between AWS profiles without having to manually edit the .aws/credentials or the environment variables.

npx switch-profile

This terminal utility helps switching between AWS CLI profiles. It sets the default profile by editing the .aws/credentials file. It requires AWS CLI v2 to be installed.

This utility also supports creating new AWS profiles, including SSO profiles as well as deleting them.

WARNING: Make sure that the following environment variables have been removed from your path, otherwise, they will conflict with the default AWS CLI profile:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_SESSION_TOKEN

Why using this utility?

switch-profile was originally created to refresh short-lived AWS SSO profiles in the terminal and set them as default. Indeed, as of 2021, the only two ways to set up a short-lived SSO profile as default in the terminal are:

• Manually paste the short-lived credentials in the terminal:
  • Browse to the AWS SSO login page and login.
  • Select an account.
  • Reveal the short-lived credentials (i.e., AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN).
  • Copy paste them in the terminal or manually edit the .aws/credentials file.
• Create an SSO profile in the terminal and update its credentials via the CLI:
  • Creating an SSO profile: aws configure sso
  • Renew a SSO credentials for a specific profile: aws sso login --profile YOUR_PROFILE

The issue with the first method is that you have to repeat it every hour, which can make long days feel even longer. The issue with the second method is that it requires your code or third party app (e.g, Terraform) to support the --profile option. There are scenarios where using this --profile option is either not possible or impractical (often impractical as this may mean all engineers should agree to use the same convention for the profile's name).

switch-profile aims to solve those issues by making setting any profile as default trivial.

Extra features

The More options supports the following:

• Create profile: Helps create both a standard or AWS SSO profile.
• Delete profiles: Helps cleaning one or many profiles.
• Refresh default profile: Helps refreshing the current default profile if it has expired (e.g., SSO profile). This option only appears when the default profile has expired.

License

BSD 3-Clause License