AWS IAM Client Package

aws.iam is a simple client package for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Simple Token Service (STS) API, which can be used to manage access credentials for AWS services.

To use the package, you will need an AWS account and to enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten. The aws.iam package profiles tools for working with IAM, including creating roles, users, groups, and credentials programmatically; it is not needed to use IAM credentials.

By default, all cloudyr packages for AWS services allow the use of credentials specified in a number of ways, beginning with:

1. User-supplied values passed directly to functions.

2. Environment variables, which can alternatively be set on the command line prior to starting R or via an Renviron.site or .Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables in R during startup (see ? Startup). Or they can be set within R:

   Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
              "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
              "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
              "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")

3. If R is running an EC2 instance, the role profile credentials provided by aws.ec2metadata.

4. Profiles saved in a /.aws/credentials "dot file" in the current working directory. The `"default" profile is assumed if none is specified.

5. A centralized ~/.aws/credentials file, containing credentials for multiple accounts. The `"default" profile is assumed if none is specified.

Profiles stored locally or in a centralized location (e.g., ~/.aws/credentials) can also be invoked via:

# use your 'default' account credentials
aws.signature::use_credentials()

# use an alternative credentials profile
aws.signature::use_credentials(profile = "bob")

Temporary session tokens are stored in environment variable AWS_SESSION_TOKEN (and will be stored there by the use_credentials() function). The aws.iam package provides an R interface to IAM roles and the generation of temporary session tokens via the security token service (STS).

Code Examples

The package gives basically fully access to IAM functionality to create and manage groups and users, including creating and managing AWS credentials on-the-fly.

library("aws.iam")

# create user
u <- create_user("example-user")

# create group
(g <- create_group("example"))

## GroupId:    AGPAIZHQL3T5B4GGXXVGU 
## GroupName:  /example 
## Arn:        arn:aws:iam::920667304251:group/example 
## CreateDate: 1498901165

# rename group
update_group(g, "example2")

## [1] TRUE

# add user to group
add_user(u, "example2")

## [1] TRUE

get_group_users("example2")

## [[1]]
## UserName:   /example-user 
## UserId:     AIDAI54ZINZ2F3NUVS4XW 
## Arn:        arn:aws:iam::920667304251:user/example-user 
## CreateDate: 1498901164 
## 
## attr(,"group")
## GroupId:    AGPAIZHQL3T5B4GGXXVGU 
## GroupName:  /example2 
## Arn:        arn:aws:iam::920667304251:group/example2 
## CreateDate: 1498901165

# create AWS credentials for user
k <- create_key(u)
# update key to inactive
update_key(k, u, "Inactive")

## [1] TRUE

list_keys(u)

## [[1]]
## AccessKeyId: AKIAIUSX3NZJVKNGNTRA 
## CreateDate:  1498901167 
## Status:      Inactive 
## UserName:    example-user

# cleanup
delete_key(k)

## [1] TRUE

remove_user(u, "example2")

## [1] TRUE

delete_user(u)

## [1] TRUE

delete_group("example2")

## [1] TRUE

Installation

This package is not yet on CRAN. To install the latest development version you can install from the cloudyr drat repository:

# latest stable version
install.packages("aws.iam", repos = c(cloudyr = "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat", getOption("repos")))

Or, to pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub:

if (!require("ghit")) {
    install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("cloudyr/aws.iam")

To install the latest version from CRAN, simply use install.packages("aws.iam").