aws-sts-helper

A library for facilitating the acquisition of temporary security tokens through the AWS Security Token Service (STS)

What does it do?

Using a particular AWS access key pair, query for and store a new access key pair, plus session token that is suitable to use for another role, that may have more specific or narrower permissions than the original access key pair.

For example, a role could be constructed with a policy that only allows for the creation of a named S3 bucket dev-projects-*, and provide all read-write permissions to the bucket created. Then this role can be access using the generated temporary access key and token by a locally developed project, limited to accessing just the dev-projects-* buckets in S3.

By default, any credentials created in this way are stored in a file, ./.aws-sts.json. This way the credentials are cached locally and available to reuse for the duration that the temporary credentials last. This library will look for the existence of the stored credentials and if they are still valid (not-expired) it will return them instead of generating a new set.

Usage:

You can set environment variables and/or set values in the configuration map passed into the getTemporaryCredentials call.

Available variables and their usage:

These values can be passed either in the environment or in a configuration object, with environment variables overriding any passed in configuration.

Caching

By default, if credentials are successfully returned from the AWS STS, they will be written to the local filesystem. You can turn this behavior off by setting cache: false in the options map.

const sts = require('aws-sts-helper');
 
sts.getTemporaryCredentials({
    {
        cache: true,
        credentials: {
            fileName: './.aws-sts.json',
            mode: 0o600
        },
        role: {
            arn: 'arn:aws:iam::<account number>:role/ProjectsS3Development',
            sessionName: 'colbyProjectsDev',
            durationSeconds: 43200
        },
        key: {
            access: 'access key that allows calls to STS assume role',
            secret: 'secret key paired to access key'
        }
    }
}, (err, temp) => {
    if (err) {
        console.log('err:',err);
        process.exit(-1);
    }
 
    console.log('temp:',temp);
    sts.writeShellConfigSync("aws-temp-credentials.sh", temp);
});

const sts = require('aws-sts-helper');
 
// Assumes all setup is in environment
sts.getTemporaryCredentials({}, (err, temp) => {
    if (err) {
        console.log('err:',err);
        process.exit(-1);
    }
 
    console.log('Credentials expired:',sts.credentialsExpired(temp));
});