axolotl

axolotl

axolotl (ax) is an opinionated CLI that minimally emulates the behavior of the aws-vault exec command to run ad-hoc commands or switch to a subshell of a specific AWS profiles on the fly.

Additionally, credentials are obtained automatically using gimme-aws-creds to make a simple one command workflow for switching AWS profiles and credentials. This behavior can be disabled by running ax --no-verify and re-enabled by ax --verify.

Prerequisites

If you're installing direct from source instead of with homebrew and you want the default automatic credential acquisition to work you'll need to install gimme-aws-creds yourself. This is automatically taken care of when installing with homebrew.

Installation

This is a Go CLI and as such can be installed the standard Go way if you have a working Go installation. A homebrew package is automatically provided for tagged releases if you don't have or want Go installed on your computer.

Install with go install

go install github.com/ArcadiaPower/axolotl@latest

OR

Install with homebrew

brew tap ArcadiaPower/tap
brew install ArcadiaPower/tap/axolotl

Note: Installing with homebrew has the added benefit of automatically installing gimme-aws-creds as a dependency if it wasn't already installed.

Configuration

The configuration file is created automatically at $HOME/.config/ax/config.yaml if it doesn't already exist.

• autogimmeawscreds - This enables automatic credential verification and acquisition with gimme-aws-creds, the default is true.
• defaultregion - This sets the default AWS region that will be used, the default is us-east-1.

Usage

To switch to a named profile and the default AWS Region of us-east-1:

ax --profile example-staging

To switch to a named profile and a specific AWS Region:

ax --profile example-staging --region us-west-2

Same as the last example, but use short flags:

ax -p example-staging -r us-west-2

Execute a single command using a named profile:

ax -p example-staging -- aws sts get-caller-identity

Change the default region to us-west-2 and execute a single command using a named profile without having to specify the region:

ax --default-region us-west-2

ax -p example-staging -- aws sts get-caller-identity

Profile Completion

If you run ax without passing any arguments the tool provides autocomplete and tabcomplete functionality based on the profile names in your local ~/.aws/credentials file or the file specified by the $AWS_SHARED_CREDENTIALS_FILE environment variable if set.

Credit and Why Yet Another Tool

This tool exists thanks to the inspiration of far greater utilities, specifically aws-vault, saml2aws, and gimme-aws-creds. It's born out of a need for a workflow to authenticate many AWS accounts via Okta SSO and solves a specific niche that the existing tools didn't quite cover.

I wanted the simplicity of the aws-vault exec command with the requirement for Okta based SAML authentication which wasn't an option because the authors of aws-vault recommend other tools like saml2aws for obtaining credentials through a SAML provider: https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault/issues/235

gimme-aws-creds was a better fit than saml2aws for obtaining the credentials since it allows getting credentials for all profiles rather than one by one. This tool simply recreates a minimal version of aws-vault exec with gimme-aws-creds as the mechanism for obtaining credentials.

License

ax is released under the MIT License