Bash with AWS CLI - unable to locate credentials

Answering in case someone stumbles across this based on the question's title.

I had the same problem where by the AWS CLI was reporting unable to locate credentials.

I had removed the [default] set of credentials from my credentials file as I wasn't using them and didn't think they were needed. It seems that they are.

I then reformed my file as follows and it worked...

[default]
aws_access_key_id=****
aws_secret_access_key=****
region=eu-west-2

[deployment-profile]
aws_access_key_id=****
aws_secret_access_key=****
region=eu-west-2

The unable to locate credentials error usually occurs when working with different aws profiles and the current terminal can't identify the credentials for the current profile.

Notice that you don't need to fill all the credentials via aws configure each time - you just need to reference to the relevant profile that was configured once.

From the Named profiles section in AWS docs:

The AWS CLI supports using any of multiple named profiles that are stored in the config and credentials files. You can configure additional profiles by using aws configure with the --profile option, or by adding entries to the config and credentials files.

The following example shows a credentials file with two profiles. The first [default] is used when you run a CLI command with no profile. The second is used when you run a CLI command with the
--profile user1 parameter.

~/.aws/credentials (Linux & Mac) or %USERPROFILE%\.aws\credentials (Windows):

[default]
aws_access_key_id=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
aws_secret_access_key=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

[user1]
aws_access_key_id=AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE
aws_secret_access_key=je7MtGbClwBF/2Zp9Utk/h3yCo8nvbEXAMPLEKEY

So, after setting up the specific named profile (user1 in the example above) via aws configure or directly in the ~/.aws/credentials file you can select the specific profile:

aws ec2 describe-instances --profile user1

Or export it to terminal:

$ export AWS_PROFILE=user1

sudo will change the $HOME directory (and therefore ~) to /root, and remove most bash variables like AWS_CONFIG_FILE from the environment. Make sure you do everything with aws as root or as your user, dont mix.

Make sure you did sudo aws configure for example. And try

sudo bash -c 'AWS_CONFIG_FILE=/root/.aws/config aws s3 sync s3://backup-test-s3 /s3-backup/test'

You might prefer to remove all the sudo from inside the script, and just sudo the script itself.

While you might have your credentials and config file properly located in ~/.aws, it might not be getting picked up by your user account.

Run this command to see if your credentials have been set:aws configure list

To set the credentials, run this command: aws configure and then enter the credentials that are specified in your ~/.aws/credentials file.