Configure AWS Credentials for GitHub Actions

Configure your AWS credentials and region environment variables for use in other GitHub Actions. This action implements the AWS SDK credential resolution chain and exports environment variables for your other Actions to use. Environment variable exports are detected by both the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI for AWS API calls.

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Recent News

Long-term credentials warning (10/3/23)

We have added a warning when using long-term credentials to access AWS (IAM access keys and secret keys). Using long-term credentials requires you to create IAM users and properly secure the access keys to prevent their disclosure. A better approach is to use GitHub's support for OpenID Connect to authenticate using an IAM role to generate temporary security credentials.

v4 Announcement (9/11/23)

We have just released v4 of Configure AWS Credentials. The only thing that changed from v3 is that the action now runs on node20 instead of node16. You can still see the v3 announcement below, as it is still recent.

v3 Announcement (8/23/23)

We have recently released v3 of Configure AWS Credentials! With this new release we have migrated the code to TypeScript, and have also migrated away from using v2 of the JavaScript AWS SDK. This should eliminate the warning you have seen in your workflow logs about v2 deprecation.

In addition to the refactored codebase, we have also introduced some changes to existing functionality, added some new features, and fixed some bugs. These changes should be backwards compatible with your existing workflows.

Notable changes to existing functionality

• By default, the assumed role credentials will only be valid for one hour in all use cases. This is changed from 6 hours in v2. You can adjust this value with the role-duration-seconds input.
• By default, your account ID will not be masked in workflow logs. This was changed from being masked by default in the previous version. AWS does not consider account IDs as sensitive information, so this change reflects that stance. You can revert to the old default and mask your account ID in workflow logs by setting the mask-aws-account-id input to true.

New features

• You can now configure retry settings in case your STS call fails. By default, we retry with exponential backoff twelve times. You can disable this behavior altogether by setting the disable-retry input to true, or you can configure the number of times the action will retry with the retry-max-attempts input.
• You can now set the returned credentials as action step outputs. To do this, you can set the output-credentials prop to true.
• There's now an option to clear the AWS-related environment variables at the start of the action. Clearing these variables is often a workaround for problems, so enabling this can be helpful if existing credentials or environment variables are interfering with the action. You can enable this by setting the unset-current-credentials input to true.

Bug fixes

You can find a list of bugs that have been fixed in v3 in the changelog.

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Table of Contents

• Overview
• Security recommendations
• Using this action
  • Credential Lifetime
  • External ID
  • Session tagging
  • Sample IAM Role Permissions
  • Misc
• OIDC
  • Audience
  • Sample IAM OIDC CloudFormation Template
  • Claims and scoping permissions
  • Further info
• Self-Hosted Runners
  • Proxy Configuration
  • Use with the AWS CLI
• Examples
• License Summary
• Security Disclosures

Overview

We support five methods for fetching credentials from AWS, but we recommend that you use GitHub's OIDC provider in conjunction with a configured AWS IAM Identity Provider endpoint.

To do that, you would add the following step to your workflow:

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
        aws-region: us-east-2

This will cause the action to perform an AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity call and return temporary security credentials for use by other steps in your workflow. In order for this to work, you'll need to preconfigure the IAM Identity Provider in your AWS account (see the OIDC section below for details).

You can use this action with the AWS CLI available in GitHub's hosted virtual environments or run this action multiple times to use different AWS accounts, regions, or IAM roles in the same GitHub Actions workflow. As an example, here is a complete workflow file that uploads artifacts to Amazon S3.

jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Upload to Amazon S3
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    # These permissions are needed to interact with GitHub's OIDC Token endpoint.
    permissions:
      id-token: write
      contents: read
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Configure AWS credentials from Test account
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/my-github-actions-role-test
        aws-region: us-east-1
    - name: Copy files to the test website with the AWS CLI
      run: |
        aws s3 sync . s3://my-s3-test-website-bucket
    - name: Configure AWS credentials from Production account
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::222222222222:role/my-github-actions-role-prod
        aws-region: us-west-2
    - name: Copy files to the production website with the AWS CLI
      run: |
        aws s3 sync . s3://my-s3-prod-website-bucket

See action.yml for the full documentation for this action's inputs and outputs.

Note about GHES

Some of this documentation may be inaccurate if you are using GHES (GitHub Enterprise Servers), please take note to review the GitHub documentation when relevant.

For example, the URL that the OIDC JWT is issued from is different than the usual token.actions.githubusercontent.com, and will be unique to your enterprise server. As a result, you will need to configure this differently when you create the Identity Provider.

Security recommendations

We recommend following Amazon IAM best practices for the AWS credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows, including:

• Do not store credentials in your repository's code.
• Grant least privilege to the credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows. Grant only the permissions required to perform the actions in your GitHub Actions workflows.
• Monitor the activity of the credentials used in GitHub Actions workflows.

Using this action

There are five different supported ways to retrieve credentials:

• Using GitHub's OIDC provider (AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity)
• Proceeding as an IAM user (No STS call is made)
• Using access keys as action input (AssumeRole)
• Using a WebIdentity Token File (AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity)
• Using existing credentials in your runner (AssumeRole)

We recommend using GitHub's OIDC provider to get short-lived AWS credentials needed for your actions. See OIDC for more information on how to setup your AWS account to assume a role with OIDC.

The following table describes which method is used based on which values are supplied to the Action:

Identity Used	aws-access-key-id	role-to-assume	web-identity-token-file	role-chaining	id-token permission
[✅ Recommended] Assume Role directly using GitHub OIDC provider		✔			✔
IAM User	✔
Assume Role using IAM User credentials	✔	✔
Assume Role using WebIdentity Token File credentials		✔	✔
Assume Role using existing credentials		✔		✔

*Note: role-chaining is not necessary to use existing credentials in every use case. If you're getting a "Credentials loaded by the SDK do not match" error, try enabling this prop.

Credential Lifetime

The default session duration is 1 hour.

If you would like to adjust this you can pass a duration to role-duration-seconds, but the duration cannot exceed the maximum that was defined when the IAM Role was created.

External ID

If your role requires an external ID to assume, you can provide the external ID with the role-external-id input

Session tagging and name

The default session name is "GitHubActions", and you can modify it by specifying the desired name in role-session-name. The session will be tagged with the following tags: (GITHUB_ environment variable definitions can be found here)

Key	Value
GitHub	"Actions"
Repository	GITHUB_REPOSITORY
Workflow	GITHUB_WORKFLOW
Action	GITHUB_ACTION
Actor	GITHUB_ACTOR
Branch	GITHUB_REF
Commit	GITHUB_SHA

Note: all tag values must conform to the requirements. Particularly, GITHUB_WORKFLOW will be truncated if it's too long. If GITHUB_ACTOR or GITHUB_WORKFLOW contain invalid characters, the characters will be replaced with an '*'.

The action will use session tagging by default during role assumption, unless you are assuming a role with a WebIdentity. For WebIdentity role assumption, the session tags have to be included in the encoded WebIdentity token. This means that Tags can only be supplied by the OIDC provider, and they cannot set during the AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity API call within the Action. See issue 419 for more info

You can skip this session tagging by providing role-skip-session-tagging as true in the action's inputs:

      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        role-skip-session-tagging: true

Session policies

Inline session policies

An IAM policy in stringified JSON format that you want to use as an inline session policy. Depending on preferences, the JSON could be written on a single line like this:

      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
         inline-session-policy: '{"Version":"2012-10-17","Statement":[{"Sid":"Stmt1","Effect":"Allow","Action":"s3:List*","Resource":"*"}]}'

Or we can have a nicely formatted JSON as well:

      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
         inline-session-policy: >-
          {
           "Version": "2012-10-17",
           "Statement": [
            {
             "Sid":"Stmt1",
             "Effect":"Allow",
             "Action":"s3:List*",
             "Resource":"*"
            }
           ]
          }

Managed session policies

The Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) of the IAM managed policies that you want to use as managed session policies. The policies must exist in the same account as the role. You can pass a single managed policy like this:

      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
         managed-session-policies: arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess

And we can pass multiple managed policies likes this:

      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
         managed-session-policies: |
          arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess
          arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3OutpostsReadOnlyAccess

Misc

Adjust the retry mechanism

You can now configure retry settings for when the STS call fails. By default, we retry with exponential backoff 12 times. You can disable this behavior altogether by setting the disable-retry input to true, or you can configure the number of times it retries with the retry-max-attempts input.

Mask account ID

Your account ID is not masked by default in workflow logs since it's not considered sensitive information. However, you can set the mask-aws-account-id input to true to mask your account ID in workflow logs if desired.

Unset current credentials

Sometimes, existing credentials in your runner can get in the way of the intended outcome, and the recommended solution is to include another step in your workflow which unsets the environment variables set by this action. Now if you set the unset-current-credentials input to true, the workaround is made eaiser

Special characters in AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Some edge cases are unable to properly parse an AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY if it contains special characters. For more information, please see the AWS CLI documentation. If you set the special-characters-workaround option, this action will continually retry fetching credentials until we get one that does not have special characters. This option overrides the disable-retry and retry-max-attempts options.

OIDC

We recommend using GitHub's OIDC provider to get short-lived AWS credentials needed for your actions. When using OIDC, this action will create a JWT unique to the workflow run, and it will use this JWT to assume the role. For this action to create the JWT, it is required for your workflow to have the id-token: write permission:

    permissions:
      id-token: write
      contents: read

Audience

When the JWT is created, an audience needs to be specified. By default, the audience is sts.amazonaws.com and this will work for most cases. Changing the default audience may be necessary when using non-default AWS partitions. You can specify the audience through the audience input:

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials for China region audience
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        audience: sts.amazonaws.com.cn
        aws-region: us-east-3
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role

Sample IAM OIDC CloudFormation Template

To use GitHub's OIDC provider, you must first set up federation with the provider in as an IAM IdP. The GitHub OIDC provider only needs to be created once per account (i.e. multiple IAM Roles that can be assumed by the GitHub's OIDC can share a single OIDC Provider).

Note that the thumbprint has been set to all F's because the thumbprint is not used when authenticating token.actions.githubusercontent.com. Instead, IAM uses its library of trusted CAs to authenticate. However, this value is still required by the API.

This CloudFormation template will configure the IdP for you. You can copy the template below, or load it from here: https://d38mtn6aq9zhn6.cloudfront.net/configure-aws-credentials-latest.yml

Parameters:
  GitHubOrg:
    Description: Name of GitHub organization/user (case sensitive)
    Type: String
  RepositoryName:
    Description: Name of GitHub repository (case sensitive)
    Type: String
  OIDCProviderArn:
    Description: Arn for the GitHub OIDC Provider.
    Default: ""
    Type: String
  OIDCAudience:
    Description: Audience supplied to configure-aws-credentials.
    Default: "sts.amazonaws.com"
    Type: String

Conditions:
  CreateOIDCProvider: !Equals 
    - !Ref OIDCProviderArn
    - ""

Resources:
  Role:
    Type: AWS::IAM::Role
    Properties:
      AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
        Statement:
          - Effect: Allow
            Action: sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
            Principal:
              Federated: !If 
                - CreateOIDCProvider
                - !Ref GithubOidc
                - !Ref OIDCProviderArn
            Condition:
              StringEquals:
                token.actions.githubusercontent.com:aud: !Ref OIDCAudience
              StringLike:
                token.actions.githubusercontent.com:sub: !Sub repo:${GitHubOrg}/${RepositoryName}:*

  GithubOidc:
    Type: AWS::IAM::OIDCProvider
    Condition: CreateOIDCProvider
    Properties:
      Url: https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com
      ClientIdList: 
        - sts.amazonaws.com
      ThumbprintList:
        - ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Outputs:
  Role:
    Value: !GetAtt Role.Arn 

Claims and scoping permissions

To align with the Amazon IAM best practice of granting least privilege, the assume role policy document should contain a Condition that specifies a subject (sub) allowed to assume the role. GitHub also recommends filtering for the correct audience (aud). See AWS IAM documentation on which claims you can filter for in your trust policies.

Without a subject (sub) condition, any GitHub user or repository could potentially assume the role. The subject can be scoped to a GitHub organization and repository as shown in the CloudFormation template. However, scoping it down to your org and repo may cause the role assumption to fail in some cases. See Example subject claims for specific details on what the subject value will be depending on your workflow. You can also customize your subject claim if you want full control over the information you can filter for in your trust policy. If you aren't sure what your subject (sub) key is, you can add the actions-oidc-debugger action to your workflow to see the value of the subject (sub) key, as well as other claims.

Additional claim conditions can be added for higher specificity as explained in the GitHub documentation. Due to implementation details, not every OIDC claim is presently supported by IAM.

Further info

For further information on OIDC and GitHub Actions, please see:

• AWS docs: Creating OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity providers
• AWS docs: IAM JSON policy elements: Condition
• GitHub docs: About security hardening with OpenID Connect
• GitHub docs: Configuring OpenID Connect in Amazon Web Services
• GitHub changelog: GitHub Actions: Secure cloud deployments with OpenID Connect

Self-Hosted Runners

If you run your GitHub Actions in a self-hosted runner that already has access to AWS credentials, such as an EC2 instance, then you do not need to provide IAM user access key credentials to this action. We will use the standard AWS JavaScript SDK credential resolution methods to find your credentials, so if the AWS JS SDK can authenticate on your runner, this Action will as well.

If no access key credentials are given in the action inputs, this action will use credentials from the runner environment using the default methods for the AWS SDK for Javascript.

You can use this action to simply configure the region and account ID in the environment, and then use the runner's credentials for all AWS API calls made by your Actions workflow:

uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
  aws-region: us-east-2

In this case, your runner's credentials must have permissions to call any AWS APIs called by your Actions workflow.

Or, you can use this action to assume a role, and then use the role credentials for all AWS API calls made by your Actions workflow:

uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
  aws-region: us-east-2
  role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role

In this case, your runner's credentials must have permissions to assume the role.

You can also assume a role using a web identity token file, such as if using Amazon EKS IRSA. Pods running in EKS worker nodes that do not run as root can use this file to assume a role with a web identity.

Proxy Configuration

If you run in self-hosted environments and in secured environment where you need use a specific proxy you can set it in the action manually.

Additionally this action will always consider already configured proxy in the environment.

Manually configured proxy:

uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
with:
  aws-region: us-east-2
  role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role
  http-proxy: "http://companydomain.com:3128"

Proxy configured in the environment variable:

# Your environment configuration
HTTP_PROXY="http://companydomain.com:3128"

The action will read the underlying proxy configuration from the environment and you don't need to configure it in the action.

Use with the AWS CLI

This workflow does not install the AWS CLI into your environment. Self-hosted runners that intend to run this action prior to executing aws commands need to have the AWS CLI installed if it's not already present. Most GitHub hosted runner environments should include the AWS CLI by default.

Examples

AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity (recommended)

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-region: us-east-2
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
        role-session-name: MySessionName

In this example, the Action will load the OIDC token from the GitHub-provided environment variable and use it to assume the role arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role with the session name MySessionName.

AssumeRole with role previously assumed by action in same workflow

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-region: us-east-2
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
        role-session-name: MySessionName
    - name: Configure other AWS Credentials
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-region: us-east-2
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::987654321000:role/my-second-role
        role-session-name: MySessionName
        role-chaining: true

In this two-step example, the first step will use OIDC to assume the role arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role just as in the prior example. Following that, a second step will use this role to assume a different role, arn:aws:iam::987654321000:role/my-second-role.

AssumeRole with static IAM credentials in repository secrets

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
        aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
        aws-region: us-east-2
        role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_TO_ASSUME }}
        role-external-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ROLE_EXTERNAL_ID }}
        role-duration-seconds: 1200
        role-session-name: MySessionName

In this example, the secret AWS_ROLE_TO_ASSUME contains a string like arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role. To assume a role in the same account as the static credentials, you can simply specify the role name, like role-to-assume: my-github-actions-role.

Retrieving credentials from step output, AssumeRole with temporary credentials

    - name: Configure AWS Credentials 1
      id: creds
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-region: us-east-2
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-github-actions-role
        output-credentials: true
    - name: get caller identity 1
      run: |
        aws sts get-caller-identity
    - name: Configure AWS Credentials 2
      uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
      with:
        aws-region: us-east-2
        aws-access-key-id: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-access-key-id }}
        aws-secret-access-key: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-secret-access-key }}
        aws-session-token: ${{ steps.creds.outputs.aws-session-token }}
        role-to-assume: arn:aws:iam::123456789100:role/my-other-github-actions-role
    - name: get caller identity2
      run: |
        aws sts get-caller-identity

This example shows that you can reference the fetched credentials as outputs if output-credentials is set to true. This example also shows that you can use the aws-session-token input in a situation where session tokens are fetched and passed to this action.

License Summary

This code is made available under the MIT license.

Security Disclosures

If you would like to report a potential security issue in this project, please do not create a GitHub issue. Instead, please follow the instructions here or email AWS security directly.